Category: Application Performance Management

5 Application Performance Management Tools Every IT Director Should Use (APM Content)

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Modern businesses require modern solutions. Applications have moved from being primarily used for back-office tasks, such as payroll, to the forefront of almost every business. The latest application performance management, or APM, tools are designed to automate diagnostic and action recommendations, which allow IT professionals to shift their focus on the growing technological demands of modern businesses.

The following 5 application performance management tools are designed to save you time from having to constantly monitor and analyze data to keep all applications running at an optimum pace.

New Relic APM

New Relic APM offers an intuitive interface to swiftly access and begin monitoring all applications. When installed, New Relic AMP provides immediate insights into application performance in a simple and user-friendly format. It operates by collecting data based on customizeable parameters, which means you only see the data that’s most important to your business.

Some of the most notable features include:

  • At-a-glance performance monitoring
  • Browsing monitoring to provide insights regarding different user experiences
  • SQL tracking to showcase what statements are responsible for slowing user experiences
  • Critical business transaction monitoring

You can visit NewRelic by going to newrelic.com

AppDynamics

Regarded as an all-inclusive application management platform, AppDynamics continually monitors application behavior and performance. Upon inspection, AppDynamics is able to create customized insights regarding how the performance of your various applications impacts the operations of the entire site, and ultimately business operations. If you wish to have further transparency and knowledge of how each application is affecting the performance and user experience of your business, AppDynamics may be your ideal choice.

Notable features include:

  • Code-level performance diagnosis and problem solving
  • Entire application stacks visualization and monitoring
  • Dynamic and conclusive performance flow maps
  • Real-time performance and business metrics
  • Customized extensions to integrate into third-party tools and platforms

Check out AppDynamics at appdynamics.com.

Foglight

Does your business deal with multiple coding languages while simultaneously handling a combination of physical and virtual services? The more complex a business structure and digital implementation, the greater the need for a well-rounded and conclusive application performance management tool. Foglight effectively manages the performance of various applications, and application languages, to offer detailed insight into how applications are not only affecting user experience, but how its operation is affecting the business.

Features Include:

  • Highly detailed UX perspectives through an intuitive user experience platform
  • Database monitoring and managing from a single platform
  • Digital infrastructure monitoring based on multiple perspectives (user, client, business, etc.)
  • Web-based and custom application monitoring
  • Employee productivity application monitoring
  • Automatic collection and monitoring of user incidents

Visit quest.com/foglight to determine if its services are ideal for the IT environment of your business.

Compuware APM

It’s no secret the modern application landscape is ever-evolving in its complexity and abilities. While this progression means further control and advanced UI/UX platforms, it also means IT directors are facing new and increasingly challenging scenarios. Compuware APM is an all-inclusive solution designed to meet these demands by incorporating a wide array of products and services into its APM tools. By allowing customers to choose a custom solution, you’ll receive comprehensive APM capability without weighing down your servers and desktop with erroneous tools.

Features Include:

  • End-to-end base-level monitoring
  • Production, development and testing tools
  • In-depth user-experience monitoring and analysis
  • Real-time and synthetic enterprise application monitoring
  • Cloud-based application monitoring for private, public or combination cloud applications

You can visit Compuware (Gomez) at www.compuware.com.

BMC Software APM

Regarded as the “APM for everyone,” BMC Software APM offers a fully comprehensive medium for monitoring, diagnosing and correcting application performance. Users may gain insights ranging from end-user experience to code-level diagnostics for ultimate control of front-end and back-end applications. Known throughout the IT community as one of the most powerful tools for implementing solutions and identifying the root cause of failures, this APM tool has made its way into the arsenal of many companies.

Features Include:

  • Potential error alerts, which alerts administrators before issue impact user experiences
  • Catalogue and inform administrators of intermittent and general application slowdowns
  • Minute-by-minute performance analysis
  • SQL statement monitoring
  • Application error isolation
  • Code-level performance monitoring, diagnosing and correcting

Contact BMC by visiting bmc.com to discover if their APM solutions work for you and your business.

There are other providers as well that specialize in certain things, and an honorable mention goes out to Dotcom-Monitor, and Keynote as being companies that also offer good quality solutions.

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APM Solutions to Enhance User Satisfaction

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Maintaining customer satisfaction is among the most important, if not the most important, element of a successful enterprise. Because of this, many businesses are turning to web and mobile applications to enhance user experiences. While it may seem tending to user satisfaction is a full-time job within itself, application performance management solutions are available to streamline this process while simultaneously enhancing the effectiveness and reliability of all applications. It’s only with an APM solution that you’re given a 360 degree view of web and mobile applications to better monitor its performance and detect the root causes of errors before it causes critical infrastructure errors.

Application Performance Management – Enahncing User Experiences

Perhaps one of the most beneficial aspects of application performance management is its ability to enhance user experiences by continually monitoring the functionality and reliability of all applications. While the exact steps used to accomplish this goal will vary among the businesses and its used applications, the following are essential steps taken to ensure experiences are not only positive, but stable among all users:

  • User records and playback of their processes. For example, an effective APM solution is capable of recording patterns from beginning to end, which is then reviewed to ensure all events and transactions were executed according to the standard operating procedures established by your business.
  • Continual performance monitoring of applications. While at the beginning of the day an application could be performing at its peak level of efficiency, by the end of the day its performance could dwindle due to traffic and other elements. APM solutions ensure user experiences are universal and constant by continuously monitoring the performance of an application at all levels.
  • Collecting data from the back and front end of each application. Part of the monitoring aspect of APM is reviewing data metrics from an application. These metrics are transferred into contextual or graphic form so IT managers are able to determine if an error exists, or if there is a potential for errors to arise.

Application Performance Management – Diagnostics and Monitoring

The primary goal of any APM solution is to provide continuous monitoring of all applications to identify event errors and diagnose the root cause of such errors before they become catastrophic to the integrity of your infrastructure. There are many different avenues an APM tool may take to accomplish this goal; however, the following are universal across all platforms and system specifications:

  • Application server monitoring both during peak and off times.
  • Transaction tracing to determine whether each line was executed as it should for optimum user experiences.
  • Web server monitoring, which tracks network traffic and continuously monitors network infrastructure for existing or potential errors.

Database monitoring to provide consistent the performance across all database platforms. This feature is designed to reduce overall administrative costs associated with manual monitoring/management while simultaneously improving service levels and repair time.

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The Importance of Performance Metrics in Application Management

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When it comes to the performance of your applications, regardless of where they’re hosted, its performance determines not only the efficiency of your entire network, but also the experience had by users. While performance issues are a headache for all IT managers, apps used by customers and/or internal workers must continually operate according to the highest standards. If an application should experience continual issues regarding its performance, you should adopt an effective APM solution capable of creating and monitoring several performance metrics.

Essential Performance Metrics for Application Management

Although there are many different elements you must look for in an APM tool, when it comes to performance metrics there are several specific metric systems utilized to ensure your application continuously runs at its optimum rate. These important performance metrics include:

  • Failures to Reconnect – This metric measures the number of requests made, but were unsuccessful, which is essential to determine how many users are unable to successfully utilize the application. An having a process in place for monitoring application performance is a great way to keep tabs on this.
  • Connection Delay Duration – While the application may connect to its necessary servers and networks, if there is a delay in establishing this connection you may find customers and users abandoning the application, which may result in a drop in revenue or confidence in your business.
  • Current Active Connections – Being able to monitor the number of active connections within any single application ensures your bandwidth matches the server requirements for that particular app.
  • Active Connection Peak Levels – Part of managing the performance of an application is being able to delve into the behavior of the application during its peak traffic moments.
  • Number of Leaked Connections – Leaked application connections occur when a connection to your database is opened and for some reason the application does not close the connection upon completion of its event. Monitoring leaked connections is an important element when it comes to identifying issues and errors within a database and application coding.
  • Total Transaction Count – Monitoring the total number of transactions is one of the most effective ways of managing the overall performance of your applications. Any APM tool should be able to give you these metrics on a real-time basis as well as in overall, or general, reports.

Other application performance metrics you must be continually aware of include:

  • Cache Access Count
  • Beans in Current Use Count
  • Activation Count
  • Passivation Count
  • Number of Open Sockets
  • Backlog Acceptance
  • Total Invocation Count

In addition to monitoring application performance, it’s also important to ensure that your servers are functioning properly and that you’re using a good quality hosting company. If you end up using a lower-tier shared host, it’s possibly that your performance metrics could really suffer. It’s really important to look at how well a hosting company maintains their servers too. For example, when comparing Bluehost and GoDaddy, it appears that Bluehost does a better job of maintaining their servers and keeping things user-friendly, according to WebHostingBuddy. Also, keep in mind that there’s a big difference between shared hosting and VPS hosting, and other tiers of web hosts, so that’s something to consider as well.

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