The process of globalization is continuing rapidly and many corporate organizations both big and small have their production facilities or branch offices at different places. In order to access to secure information and application, increase productivity and business continuity working from remote locations, they need improved resource sharing and faster communication applications. As part of their strategic methods, many of these companies are widely using appliances known as Wide Area Networking (WAN) optimization devices to meet their business requirements.

If the transactions or downloads take a lot of time, the mobile employees cannot give prompt service to the customers. So it is very important to optimize data streams and eliminate unnecessary transfers in the network. In order to eliminate the network problems and optimize throughput, companies should prioritize the mission-critical applications to help the remote employees to access the network applications at faster rate.

The application performance is directly related to revenue protection and growth, and customer satisfaction and of course a quick return on investment. Application Performance Management (APM) is a solution for enhancing performance within a network. It maintains and monitors transmission quality at an acceptable level. It also enhances application response times by eliminating excess and unnecessary data transfer.

Application performance management is all about enhancing user’s experience with application availability and quick response time enabling them to provide good customer service. Today a majority of the companies recognize the importance of the APM and its impact on the productivity and return on investment. According to a survey conducted by IDG Research, 90 percent of the respondents of the survey believe the adoption of an APM solution will create an effective process for detecting and resolving performance issues in their network.

It monitors and performs at:

APM measures, manages, and optimizes the performance and service availability of software applications in a WAN. It monitors and manages the ongoing application 24x7 and provides a detailed breakdown of response time and its effects on server, network, application and end user levels.

• Server level

An Application Performance Management solution captures data flow pattern of each important transaction. APM also forecasts response times when the data centers are consolidated.

• Network level

At network level, it reduces risks to application performance and optimizes bandwidth capacity. It provides insight into the WAN application traffic patterns of the company. It identifies the top applications based on bandwidth usage, packet losses and failed TCP connections, if any.

• Application level

At application level, the APM monitors and manages new application rollouts, determines the root cause of slow response time for a mission critical application and captures data flow pattern of each important transaction.

• End-user level

The user’s experience with an application is very important. Application availability and response time are the main performance functions that end users look for. They should be sufficiently satisfied with application interactions to remain productive. APM at the end user level monitors and manages the baseline current user response times for the critical applications.

Best practices

The main goal of APM best practices is to improve the performance outcome by effective application performance management optimization. Some of the best practices by an APM method are:

• Understand

The APM process begins by understanding the user and application needs. Understanding what is important and how to measure the performance of the applications is the critical aspect of APM method. It comprises a comprehensive analysis of performance with respect to applications, network infrastructure and business processes of the organization.

• Measure

Then it measures data, which includes the resources used by the application and the response time of applications from the perspective of the end user. Measuring these things provides a useful tool to assess how well the systems are doing. Performance metrics are measured both in real time and over defined periods using APM solution. It delivers continuous monitoring of and reporting for the entire infrastructure.

• Communicate

By understanding and measuring the application performance, IT managers can immediately determine who is experiencing performance problems and communicate with them. They can determine with what applications the end user is facing problems and pinpoint the causes. Errors are detected in quick time minimizing risks and protecting infrastructure from failure.

• Link to business

APM determines the root cause of slow response time for a mission critical application, fine tunes the protocol to overcome inefficiencies and provides solutions to remedy performance issues. APM solution determines importance and measures performance, and then links performance to business requirements to provide great end user experience.

Since the productivity of any company depends heavily on the performance of software accessed, one should be very careful while choosing an APM solution. Even small delays can lead to considerable amounts of wasted time, which leads to end user dissatisfaction. So, let a reputed company take care of all your Application Performance Management (APM) needs. Remember, faster response times means the users get their responses quicker, work faster, which in turn increases your company's revenue.