Competencies in Application Performance Monitor (APM) Solutions

Illustration credit Larry Dragich

Contrasting capabilities is a vital part of  evaluation when we appraise application performance monitoring (APM) solutions. However it can create deceives.  There are many features that provide by application performance monitoring solutions which is not a crucial part for the user. Frequently the solutions are expensive, complex, and hard to implement in what we want. Though sometimes there are not high priority in which the features included in the affordable products. The most important thing is how nearly each solutions can fits your needs rather than determine by cost and features of a product.

What are your goals? Before you explore particular capabilities in solutions you are assess to, here are some of the priority you need to clarify with:

Goal	Priority
Ensuring the availability and performance of critical applications
Gain visibility over the entire IT service  that supports an application
Reducing user complaints
Improving MTTR time
Improving reporting (out of the box and customizable)
Eliminating alert overload and time spent unnecessarily on low-priority issues
Meeting SLA goals
Controlling IT costs
Other:

The steps:

1. Identify your highest priorities

2. Map highest priorities to specific product capabilities

3. Select better solution

For example, if improving MTTR time is the highest priority, you should look for monitoring products with strong capabilities:

• Monitoring, alerting and reporting on an application’s entire IT service
• Allowing you to define critical application dependencies so you can find the root cause quickly
• Presenting one unified dashboard so you can see problems quickly and drill down to the root cause
• Letting you customize automated actions in response to specific conditions so issues can be detected and repairs made without delay
• Providing out-of-the-box reports so you can easily track metrics such as MTTR rates over time

For reducing user complaints as a top priority, you’d need the first four of the above capabilities plus end user monitoring to alert and report on user experience’s effect of web application performance.

This exercise gives a better position to find a solution of documenting your prioritized goals and mapping them to product capabilities to prevent disappointment.