Application performance problems

By Gibu Mathew

Downtime of business applications affect business processes and causes revenue loss. Most organisations use their web applications as revenue-generating tools for their business. Any issues with these applications such as unexpected downtime will hinder the normal functioning of key business processes. In today’s ultra-competitive market scenario, customers expect uninterrupted access to applications. Downtimes that occur during business hours can put them off and thereby result in significant revenue loss. It is therefore imperative for companies that they ensure continuous availability of their mission-critical applications.

“Poor application performance impacts employee productivity and morale thereby impacting business performance.”
-Gibu Mathew

Poor application performance impacts employee productivity and morale thereby impacting business performance. When employees have to wait for a long time to complete a transaction or gather information, they begin to lose interest and their morale begins to decrease. Recent research indicates that end-users would typically wait between four and six seconds for a page to open before they abandon a session and move on to the next activity. For example, if a CRM application responds slowly, the sales people who use the application will get frustrated and might not keep the leads information up to date, which in turn affects the sales pipeline. Since employee productivity is directly tied to the success of key business processes, any dip in employee productivity can impact business performance.

Traditional NSM tools are not good enough. Complex IT infrastructure is hard to troubleshoot. Many traditional NSM tools are successful in monitoring uptime and speed of applications, but they are typically ineffective in tying the performance of these applications into the business processes they are supporting. Due to this, organisations are often forced to make decisions about streamlining key business processes without being in possession of all necessary data.

It is not enough if you monitor just the network and servers. You need to monitor all applications too in order to understand which component of the infrastructure is experiencing problems. Having this information would allow them to identify the root causes of performance issues and make educated decisions about actions required to resolve performance problems in timely manner.

ManageEngine Applications Manager provides heterogeneous monitoring capability. You need to monitor all the systems and applications in your network to make educated decisions about resolving performance problems. ManageEngine Applications Manager provides hundreds of performance metrics for monitoring a heterogeneous IT environment in a single console. It provides in-depth monitoring for servers, application servers, databases, ERPs such as SAP, web services, network services and an array of other application management capabilities that help IT administrators manage their resources effectively.

Infrastructure performance management and end-user experience monitoring helps ensure application performance. Applications Manager constantly keeps track of resource availability and performance so that end-users are not affected due to poor quality of service. IT operators and administrators can view the critical status of resources and be notified of any problems in real-time.

Applications Manager’s capabilities allow organisations to monitor the quality of the end-user experience by creating synthetic transactions and measuring application response times and end-user experience for each of these transactions. End user experience monitoring is an invaluable addition to infrastructure performance monitoring because it helps deliver better quality of service to the service users.

The ability to translate application performance metrics into business metrics such as employee productivity, customer satisfaction, etc. enables organisations to make educated decisions about the investments they need to make in optimising key business processes.

ManageEngine’s 90:10 promise gets you 90 percent of the features of the Big 4 at 10 percent of their price.

Biography

Gibu Mathew is currently Product Manager, Application Performance Management Solutions, at ManageEngine.