The Five Essential Elements of Application Performance Monitoring: Chapter 1 - In Application Performance, the End User's Experience is King

Businesses are driving their IT operations managers to improve performance and boost productivity by becoming increasingly application-centric, a radical change of the infrastructure-centric approach that IT has had for years. At the same time, however, applications themselves are becoming increasingly difficult to manage as they move toward highly-distributed, multi-tier, multi-element constructs that in many cases rely on application development frameworks such as Microsoft .NET or Java.

In The Five Essential Elements of Application Performance Monitoring, author and renowned business technology expert Don Jones discusses an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) approach that helps businesses achieve this new application-centric focus.  You will learn how to improve application performance from the perspective of the business and the end user.  Jones offers an informative discussion of new tools and techniques that are enabling new, more effective forms of APM, and closes the book with a set of evaluation criteria for APM tools, based on this approach.


Chapter 1: In Application Performance, the End User's Experience is King

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a complex set of disciplines designed to give you accurate details on how your business applications are performing. Many businesses rely on APM to tell them whether their internally‐developed applications are performing well, and many extend their monitoring to include third-party line-of-business applications. The ultimate goal of APM is to tell you whether an application that is supporting the business is slowing it down, and to provide you with tools and direction for solving application performance problems.

When it comes to measuring the overall performance and health of an entire application system, there is only one perspective that matters - that of the end users. This chapter will introduce APM and explore why end user experience (EUE) monitoring is the most important high-level metric you can have for APM.