Nov 17, 2011
We asked, you answered. Next on the list of your biggest application performance problems: Users complain about slow applications.
It happens before you’ve had your first cup of coffee on Monday morning. It happens when you are walking out the door Friday evening. The phone rings, the trouble ticket comes in, the random user drops by to let you know – “It’s slow”. And there it is, the dreaded Layer-8 problem: The bane of our existence and the reason for our...
Nov 11, 2011
The 3rd highest vote in our Twitpoll for the worst application performance problem is “fighting with other IT groups over who is at fault!” Let’s see how Visual Performance Manager can help!
In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, there was a technology that could make anything invisible. This technology was based on the “Somebody else’s problem” (SEP) field: once you make it somebody else’s problem, you cease to see it...
Nov 10, 2011
In our Twitpoll, you have voted the second worst application performance problem is that the network is blamed. OK, network guys (generic), I am sure you can cite lots of statistics, instances, and experiences that the network is NOT to be blamed for application performance problem in greater than 80% of the time!
A few years ago, many of our network customers were looking for ways to prove that it is not the network’s fault in order to throw the problems back at the application support...
Nov 03, 2011
We’ve all been asked “What’s typical?” And more often than not the answer isn’t that simple. For example the answer to “What’s it typically take to drive across town?” will usually depend on the time of day. Driving across town at rush hour, afternoon and evening are very different.
Application performance is even worse. When troubleshooting user’s performance problems we often want to compare that user’s performance against the...
Oct 20, 2011
As businesses rely more on IT to provide data services, one expectation is that the data itself be maintained in a secure manner. In the last decade, IT management reporting solutions have grown rich with detail, providing additional data points by which to ensure not only delivery, but also security.
Depending on the vendor in question, quite often they tout the level to which they report on security events, with security being the primary focus. Many clients believe that sound traffic...
Sep 30, 2011
How does inefficient application performance affect your organization? Business leaders say that poor application performance increases the cost of doing business, directly relates to lost revenue, lowers employee morale and negatively impacts customer satisfaction.
Forrester Research suggests that while better than 80 percent of businesses surveyed maintain service level agreements, those agreements are met only 74 percent of the time. When an application is not performing in accordance with...
Sep 27, 2011
Gartner published their 2011 Application Performance Monitoring Magic Quadrant early last week. We are once again on the Magic Quadrant having made the following advancements:
Visual Performance Manager met the criteria to expand to all five APM dimensions as defined by Gartner. These five dimensions include:
End user experience monitoring
Application runtime architecture discovery, modeling and display
User defined transaction profiling
Component deep dive monitoring in application context...
Sep 19, 2011
Business and technology intersect at more points than ever, creating interdependencies. Those interdependencies mean that many business activities and processes are directly and indirectly linked to IT performance. When there is poor application performance or even failure, businesses can experience a cascade effect whereby the impact is felt across a range of areas. Because effects finger out into so many directions, finding a way to measure the impact of application performance can seem...
Aug 15, 2011
In a previous blog I discussed some of the characteristics and enablers of organizational silos. In this blog I am going to talk about some of the negative aspects of organizational silos.
To put this discussion in context it is helpful to highlight the fact that a key rallying cry both in business in general, and in the IT industry in particular, is do it faster – whatever the “it” happens to be. In business, the “it” could be brining out new products or entering...
Aug 11, 2011
Recently I ran across a publicly-available Competitive Brief from a vendor who boldly proclaimed the superiority of their technology and strategy when compared to those of another vendor in the performance management space.
What got my attention was the fact that these two vendors were supposedly partners, a fact that was acknowledged in the competitive brief, just prior to some scathing verbiage condemning their so-called “partner’s” approach and solution as being...
