APM—The Secret To Building A Healthy Business Application

For any application, user performance and availability is everything. Outages of primary applications can harshly affect business productivity. When Slack (used by thousands of business professionals for communication) suffered an outage in July this year, it brought organizations to a screeching halt. Proving once again that businesses can only be as efficient as the applications they use.

Achieving optimum health for applications

Optimum health for an app doesn’t mean it’s working, but that it is performing the way market demands. Organizations need to implement an integrated Application Performance Management (APM) solution to ensure performance and continuous availability across applications. According to David Wagner, a senior product manager of product marketing at Solar Winds with over 20 years of experience focused on IT performance and optimization, application health issues arise for teams working in silos and a lack of cohesiveness. So how can businesses overcome this issue?

1. Early adoption

Implement application performance and logging tools as early as possible in the application development lifecycle. Businesses should plan to integrate application performance and availability to reduce the risk of errors during the deployment. The early adoption of APM assists business stakeholders to align their goals before going live in full production.

2. Integrated solutions

The biggest challenge to achieve performance and availability is the organization’s structure itself. Most organizations have multiple teams to monitor performance and availability. In certain cases, teams would be aligned with individual technologies like computing, storage, network, cloud, to support each application. Integrated solutions will bring synchronization in the monitoring of performance as every team is looking at the same set of information through a single pane of glass. The ability to share information across the teams will reduce the time spent on data integration and dealing with errors.

Intensive applications need to be optimized routinely based on business needs. With APM solutions in place, application developers can understand technical glitches and strategize the development.