The key capabilities of a modern application monitoring solution

A recent ITIC survey shows that a single hour of downtime can cost businesses anywhere from $100,000 to over $5 million depending on the size of the organization. These numbers could go higher depending on the length of downtime and importance of the service. Needless to say, these numbers only reinforce the importance of IT infrastructure monitoring as a long-term IT management strategy to avoid downtime altogether.

When your services go down or when end users have a poor experience, revenue will be directly impacted. A business website with poor response times or a database with poor query execution can result in significant loss of potential customers and revenue. This makes maintaining continuous application uptime and providing a positive user experience important objectives for IT admins. Costly outage incidents at Facebook and Amazon are clear warning signs for organizations that downtimes can lead to revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction.

Executing scripts and running queries to monitor performance metrics are outdated practices. As organizations continue to grow digitally, they face the inevitable challenge of quickly adapting to and learning the nuances of evolving technologies. Increased adoption of cloud services has led to an increase in the use of hybrid infrastructures. But these hybrid environments present some challenges for IT staff; they require a dynamic monitoring approach that facilitates productivity by breaking down IT silos, combining IT operations, and developing software to streamline digital transformation.

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“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a familiar adage that means you cannot know what’s successful if success isn’t defined and tracked. The same logic can be applied to your IT strategy as well; you can’t know what’s working and what’s not without measuring application performance. But in order to accomplish this, end-to-end visibility is crucial.

With a number of connected multi-protocol touch points in an IT infrastructure, manual data collection and, more importantly, data correlation can be extremely tedious. This usually leads to the use of multiple monitoring solutions. However, to effectively collect and correlate all available data, the solutions collecting it need to be able to closely integrate with each other and offer troubleshooting across multiple platforms. If IT teams have to utilize separate solutions and navigate through different user interfaces to complete their day-to-day tasks, they’ll end up wasting much of the time these solutions were meant to help save.

The ideal solution is a central monitoring approach that can provide monitoring for multiple platforms within a single console.

With a comprehensive, unified monitoring approach, you can significantly increase the efficiency of your applications. Your unified monitoring solution should be able to:

Leverage machine learning for predictive analysis

While conventional threshold configuration techniques can alert about performance hiccups, a solution that enables event correlation and issue diagnosis using artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities can significantly reduce troubleshooting time. AI in a comprehensive monitoring solution should not only facilitate automated application discovery and dependency mapping, but it should also suggest possible remedies after proactively diagnosing and prioritizing anomalies.

Optimize your site’s end-user experience

Users are quick to abandon a site with a poor loading time, which explains why site speed and upmonitoringtime are so vital for businesses. Flaws with your website are going to directly impact revenue. Imagine your application or webpage experiencing downtime when end users attempt to pay or provide required user details; many of those users will simply navigate to a competitor’s site rather than wait for yours to finish loading. With visibility into webpage size (HTML, CSS, images, etc.) and transaction details such as domain name system (DNS) lookup time, response time, network latency, etc., you can see exactly where the issue lies and quickly address it to deliver an optimal end-user experience.

Promote collaboration within teams

The term DevOps is a combination of software development and IT operations. For example, DevOps teams often have to sift through lines of code to detect and resolve performance issues. While the development team can find and fix errors in code that create problems during app development, it’s up to the testing team to constantly monitor the app’s performance once deployed to the production environment to detect anomalies that can cause downtimes.

An ideal application monitoring solution should collect more than just availability and uptime; it should be able to collect traces of transactions and database calls, and pinpoint any erroneous code or slow queries. So, while the solution helps your testing team diagnose issues faster, the insights it provides helps development teams work on a resolution. These insights can also be used to test the impact of third-party code on your application or the performance of any new features before they’re officially launched. Better collaboration translates into fewer performance problems and faster application delivery.

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Display insights for future planning

Capacity planning is a routine activity in all IT setups. Servers and applications can get overloaded and crash from the enormous loads they handle and the numerous transactions they process. Analytical details regarding overused and underused servers, and historical trends of performance attributes are vital to planning load distribution and capacity upgrades.

For most organizations, adapting to evolving trends is difficult and often depends on adopting the use of new technologies. The soaring rise in the use of cloud services over the past decade emphasizes that change, especially in technology, is always constant.

While legacy applications will likely be around for a while, organizations should rid themselves of conventional monitoring approaches and equip themselves with an insightful, central monitoring approach to diagnose critical performance problems in physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. Organizations that effectively monitor everything, from the site hosted on the cloud to the servers in the data center, will be able to deliver a seamless user experience with minimum downtimes and will, in turn, see improvements in financial performance.

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