FeaturesCloud management

When an enterprise or service provider virtualizes its IT infrastructure and begins to adopt cloud computing, the application delivery chain becomes too complex for traditional methods of performance monitoring.

"[These traditional methods] focus solely on siloed infrastructure components and what's happening behind the firewall," said Blair Drenner, vice president  of Business Development at Compuware's dynaTrace division. "While these isolated solutions confirm how well your database, network and servers are running, they can't tell you the actual experience of your end users and customers or the business impact of a problem.

"Without this information, you really can't be sure if your applications are performing optimally for your end users or customers, or if they are meeting the needs of your business."

In other words, IT stakeholders must work with business stakeholders to manage and measure the performance of business-critical applications to support the business needs of the organization. The key challenge is to ensure application availability and consistent quality of service.

"Applications have a direct impact on company revenues, customer satisfaction and brand perception," Drenner said. "Businesses need to work with their development and ops teams to ensure application availability and consistent quality of service because that will affect market share and revenue."

In Singapore, incidents like the service disruptions at DBS Bank and OCBC as well as ticketing service provider Sistic earlier this year highlight the damaging impact of insufficient or ineffective monitoring of applications and websites on a business's reputation.

Although the application performance market has been around for 20-odd years, third-party developed code and new development frameworks; service-based and globally distributed architectures; and virtualized data center and cloud deployment models are changing the application management landscape. "Today, not even the best software architects are sure how their applications really work," said Drenner.

Application management is one of the functions that monitor applications throughout the application life cycle. With Service Oriented Architectures or SOA, performance monitoring and management of complex Web services will become more important, according to Drenner.

Compuware offers two complementary tools -- dynaTrace and Gomez -- to provide visibility into the entire delivery chain to ensure a superior end user experience.

Gomez is a SaaS-based tool that provides insights into performance differences by geography, browser type and device type, using a sampling approach to satisfaction, abandonment, etc.