Get smart on application performance

Resellers should be looking at new approaches to app management, according to Owen Cole

I recently read that application performance management (APM) is the top priority for CIOs in 2012, over cloud improvements, network upgrades and new internal apps. This does not surprise me, as many organisations are relying on applications for revenue growth, customer services and employee productivity.

But can we really believe that traditional approaches to performance monitoring still suffice?

The complexity of today's IT landscape has altered the need for APM. Organisations have more applications and servers, rely on larger global networks, and store more data. Similarly, the trends for cloud computing and virtualisation make diagnosing and spotting problems increasing difficult.

Components are no longer hosted on a single machine. Each function may have been built as a service, run on multiple systems to increase levels of scalability, reliability and performance, and be moving from one system to another to meet service-level objectives and deal with short outages.

There are more potential causes of performance degradation. The traditional approach was to install agents everywhere. Most APM technologies relied on separate monitoring devices deployed on servers or within the application components to collect data for central analysis.

While they remain widely used, the inherent limitations mean this is simply no longer practical.

Selling software that requires staff or customers to install agent software on their devices is becoming more difficult, while the installation, maintenance and overheads associated with agents can be an unnecessary drain on resources.

Agent-based offerings may fail when it comes to determining many common problems. Critical information can be missed by analysing only local operational data.

As the IT landscape continues to develop, the legacy tools will only fall further behind.

Alternatives may involve ongoing monitoring and analysing of network traffic at the network layer. This requires no agents or complex configuration, being simply added to organisations' existing packet-based network monitoring tools.

These types of tools will help resellers looking to make money in the networking market.

Resellers need to start focusing on quality rather than quantity, taking the time to decide which IT vendors to work with.

IT teams can no longer afford to deal with the headaches associated with traditional monitoring tools.

Consumers expect services to work around the clock. There is little room for failure. Organisations need to be able to see, predict and fix issues in real time, safeguarding the business from critical failure and downtime and resellers need to provide the right solutions and tools to do so.

Any reseller that fails to recognise risks itself risks losing customers to competitors that do.

Owen Cole is EMEA vice president at ExtraHop Networks