When it comes to application performance management, Forrester blogger Jean-Pierre Garbani says it best: “If you don’t manage everything, you don’t manage anything.”
Application performance management, or the process that detects, diagnoses, remedies and reports application performance in a business’ software applications, helps to ensure both a business’ and end-user’s expectations are being met. Application performance can determine the speed in which transactions are being completed or delivered to the end user through a specific network and/or Web services infrastructure.
According to Gartner (News 
– Alert) research, there are five distinct functions of application performance management: end-user experience monitoring; discovery and modeling of application runtime architecture; user-defined transaction profiling, or business transaction management; application component deep-dive monitoring; and application data analytics.
Application performance management solutions are designed to scan the health of critical business applications and challenging remote sites and servers, and isolate the root cause of performance problems. Solutions are intended to gain in-depth, end-to-end visibility using troubleshooting methodology to manage the availability of performance in applications and thus provide users with a quality end-user experience based on the service level they expect from an application.
Application performance management solutions measure the effectiveness of activities before and after a new application is introduced to an environment; manage planned and unexpected changes; resolve issues down the problem domain to find the direct cause; and optimize visibility through detailed analysis capabilities.
With many companies transitioning their applications to the cloud and the increasing consolidation of data centers, WAN and VoIP, the demand for cloud-based application performance management continues to increase. According to a late 2010 survey, 45 percent of respondents at the time indicated they still did not have an application performance management solution in place. However, many major application performance management solutions providers are beginning to extend their product offerings to offer further visibility into an IT organization’s applications in cloud and virtualized environments.
Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell