Application performance management is a wide discipline that encompasses multiple sub categories, such as server monitoring and infrastructure monitoring. The best way to understand the benefits of APM is to look at what it encompasses, why people use it and exactly how it delivers on its promises.
What It Encompasses
APM, by most definitions, takes in several other wide disciplines, like server monitoring, performance troubleshooting, database monitoring, application server surveillance, service level management and more. Managers have a birds-eye view of all the functions as a whole, while ground level employees tend to be tightly connected to their specific area of discipline.
What does this mean for the bottom line? APM, when properly deployed, can create a variety of efficiencies for customers, employees, and shareholders. That’s because its main goal is to improve the user experience. Keep in mind that user experience includes dozens of vital pieces of data and is often nearly impossible to measure. The goal of any top-level IT team is to carefully study those puzzle pieces and accurately measure all parameters of end-user experience.
Benefits
It’s possible to write volumes on the detailed advantages of application performance management (note that the “M” of APM is often said to stand for “monitoring”). But the key benefits include a better customer experience, heightened employee productivity, business continuity, less revenue risk and creation of an innovation-friendly environment. That’s a lot, and some IT managers are happy to obtain one or two of those goals. Here’s a summary of the benefits of APM:
- A better user experience has multiple levels of impact on an organization, and all of them are positive. When site visitors get what they want in terms of information, products, services and interaction with customer service teams, profits rise and companies prosper. So much depends on making customers happy.
- Business continuity is the result of seamless sites that suffer minimal downtime. A main page that is non-functioning, even for a few hours, can lead to unhappy customers, decreased loyalty levels, low employee productivity, falling profits and other, all negative, repercussions. Business writers often put APM into a narrow cubbyhole within the IT discipline. In fact, it belongs somewhere near the top of the management pyramid because when apps are performing poorly, every part of a company suffers.
- It directly increases profits. Consider what happens when a shopping cart malfunctions when visitors abandon half-complete purchases, don’t return to the site and typically switch to another seller or service provider. On busy shopping days like Black Friday, just a few minutes of website downtime can translate into millions of dollars in potential sales losses. When a cart or credit card app is functioning seamlessly, users move along the path toward completing a transaction and end up coming back for more.
- Some managers see an increase in innovation because there aren’t as many emergencies related to websites and customer incidents when apps are performing at optimal levels. When IT teams are able to spend more time planning for the future and coming up with unique, creative ways to enhance profitable activities, their time is better spent.