Boost IT visibility with network-based APM

The modern enterprise has a plethora of applications, some on premise, and some in the cloud. Many of these applications are not optimised for the IT environments and stack that they run in — indeed, decades-old proprietary and third-party applications often sit next to the latest, optimised ones just delivered by in-house developers.

In this chaotic environment, the performance of these applications can have a significant impact on the ability of CIOs to respond to fast changes in the business and keep delivering value. The last thing a CIO needs is poorly performing applications that are a drain on compute, storage or network resources — and to gain insight into this, precise metrics from Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools can be tremendously helpful.

Because applications can be deployed in physical or virtual environments, the full context within which an application is deployed and all of its dependencies and bottlenecks are difficult to establish with traditional APM tools. Gaining deep operational insight into a virtual environment is more difficult than in a physical environment, where servers and infrastructure are directly accessible and transparent. In the new hybrid landscape of the physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT architecture, network-based application performance management (NAPM) can do a more comprehensive and accurate job than the traditional APM.

Application performance management can be thought of as the larger and more inclusive framework, following the more robust remit of directly managing the application, of which application performance monitoring is a subset that specifically relates to simply watching and reporting.

With applications deployed across diverse and fragmented environments, NAPM seeks to tap the single common thread that runs through all of the infrastructure layers from the physical all the way to the user: the network.

NAPM is thus able to help not only understand “what” is happening, but also the “why” of it, by providing context — from workload issues, slow databases, web services stalling to other reasons that directly affect the application. This is done through not only collecting user-level data and application requests, but also (as the name implies) network traffic, so that both ends of the stack layer are visible and can be correlated. Applications that are dynamic with elastic user bases can be easily monitored and managed via NAPM, which takes into account scalability and distribution.

While traditional APM tools watch the application by installing agents, these agents themselves can be a burden on compute resources and add to the workload or latency of the network, introducing inefficiencies. NAPM tools can be agentless, and also require minimal configuration and setup because of their ability to automatically discover applications, being plugged into data input and output across the layer.

Ultimately, the benefit of detection and remediation of application-level issues is significant when it comes to IT teams being able to deliver on Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) to customers — but often also internally. Because the modern enterprise has a host of applications serving internal users, inefficiencies and delays resulting from poor application performance can have a significant impact on internal processes and core business functions.

Because of their ability to operate seamlessly across both physical and virtual environments, NAPM tools can play an important role in migration from one environment to another. They are able to ensure a minimum of downtime by mapping out the resource use and performance levels of applications before migration and right through it. Once in a cloud-based or virtual environment, NAPM tools also provide a map of all assets from hardware devices to bandwidth usage and workloads in real time.

A great amount of due diligence is required to be undertaken by a CIO’s team before migrating applications to the cloud, and this provides a critical moment to take stock of the entire portfolio of applications running to support the enterprise. NAPM can greatly assist in this stock-taking and managerial oversight.

But especially after migration, where the cloud service provider hosts the applications but the enterprise’s IT teams are still responsible for them, both parties are able to come to an agreement around adhering to SLAs between the two parties. NAPM is able to provide detailed metrics on application performance to both the client and the service provider in a live environment, forming an important measure of SLA compliance.

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