How APM May Reduce Order Fallouts

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Regardless of your business or offered service, order fallouts, or losing an order due to technical issues, is a major concern. Customers have options as to where they wish to spend their money. Therefore, a primary concern for your business should be to eliminate this “option” by establishing solid and reliable applications for continual uptime. Reducing order sales or extended wait times is done by implementing effective application performance management solutions designed to address the major concern for all businesses: effective customer service and experience.

Correlation Between Application Performance Management and Customer Service

While at first glance you may not see the connection between APM and customer service and customer experiences, these two elements are intimately intertwined. As your company expands and the demand for your products and services increase, so does the need and requirement for effective application performance management. Not only must your company provide outstanding products, but how users interact with your online business directly determines your overall success.

Application performance management, in a sense, is a proactive approach to customer service. The standards of APM solutions ensure your website and communication methods are as effective as possible. For example, you have an application designed to streamline communications between a potential customer and your customer service department. While this may seem like a simple app, one small error could result in the information not being sent or the entire application stalling.

In our demanding world, the ease and swiftness of customer-business communication is paramount to retaining potential and current clients. While you may be aware of an issue later on in the day, hundreds of potential customers could be turned off by the lack of availability of certain applications. However, with an effective APM solution that monitors applications in real-time, your IT department will be alerted to an issue the moment it happens. This instantaneous alerting system is the difference between making a sale or losing a customer.

An effective application performance management solution monitors issues at every level of your business, which may include: CRM, Billing, ERP and other transactions carried out through an application. Because the majority of businesses utilize multi-layered configurations, the only way to effectively monitor the availability and performance of all applications, at all levels, is through an effective and powerful APM solution.

There are several real world benefits derived from application performance management solutions, which include:

  • Ease of Business Expansion - As your business grows, so does the complexity of web and mobile applications. An effective APM solution, combined with complex event processing elements, allow businesses to easily expand without the fear of catastrophic application failures, which is common when expansion is not met with appropriate network safeguards.
  • Reduced Error Correction Duration - Also referred to as MTTR (mean-time-to-repair), reducing the duration between identifying an error and correcting this problem is essential to maintain full operations and website/mobile application efficiency.
  • Reduced IT Support Expenses - Businesses can expect a significant decrease in Tier 3 support requests once an effective application performance management solution is applied. The reason? APM tools streamline the monitoring and correcting of issues before they cause complications among users or employees.

Application Performance Monitoring – Standard Practices

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The process of integrating applications into the everyday service levels of businesses is an ever-growing practice. While the purpose of application performance management is clear, which include supporting increases in productivity and business continuity, how these solutions are implemented and integrated into your network to determine its overall success. Although there are many variations as how APM solutions are utilized, the following best practices are universal across all businesses and applications.

APM Solution – Best Practices for All Businesses

 

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The primary goal of application performance management best practices is to enhance the performance of all applications by effectively managing its daily use and optimizing its transactions and events to ensure uniform and continual availability for its users. Some of the best practices for application performance management include:

  • Understanding Applications and Users - The foundation of any APM solution is the desire to fully understand the operation of each application as well as how users interact with the applications. Understanding what is important for users, and therefore understanding what is important to ensure application functionality, is critical to establish an effective APM tool. Accomplishing this goal requires: comprehensive analysis of application performance on all levels, details regarding network infrastructure as well as detailed insights into your ideal business processes.
  • Data Measurement - The goal of application performance management is to effectively gather and measure a wide array of data metrics which include process response times and end-user perspectives. By continually measuring these data elements, IT managers are provided with a unique insight into the health of each application. Data measurements should be viewed in real-time, to ensure the application is properly running at any given moment, as well as performance metrics over a given period of time, which provides insights into user trends and application patterns.
  • Streamline Communication - Once an application is monitored and reviewed, IT managers reduce the amount of time spent diagnosing and troubleshooting applications and are able to spend more time communicating with fellow professionals and users to determine how a specific issue and/or error is altering their experience. By identifying errors in real-time, the threat of overall infrastructure failure is significantly reduced. This is imperative for all businesses, both large and small.
  • Link Business With Application - Some of the most successful businesses are those that are closely linked with their applications. That is to say, the business integrates an effective APM solution that provides instant metrics and performance analysis to ensure inefficiencies and errors are remedied before they have an opportunity to affect a wide audience of customers and/or users. By closely linking a business with its applications, APM solutions enhance user experiences. Since your business productivity is closely tied to the performance of your applications, there should never be a wall between the application and business operations. APM solutions act as the connective tissue between these two entities so they may operate in unison.

Role of Application Performance Management in Fraud Detection

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Many industries concern themselves with fraud detection, and rightfully so. As the use of digital communications and applications increases, so does the threat of fraud. Regardless of your industry, application performance management is among the most effective ways to proactively monitor and safeguard your website, and ultimately, your reputation.

How APM Solutions Support Fraud Detection

While there are many solutions and tools designed specifically to detect fraud, APM solutions provide a necessary amount of leverage, which allows the detection of fraud to be more efficient and accurate. There are many ways the APM solutions are able to detect fraud, the following is an example of how application performance management can reduce the likelihood of being a victim of fraud:

  • Establish “Normal” Parameters - The only way an APM tool is able to determine if an activity or “event” could potentially be fraud is by setting “normal” parameters within each transaction/process. Once this standard has been established, the tool automatically notifies administrators if a transaction or event is requesting an operation outside of these parameters.
  • Establish Transaction Patterns – Each process within an application only has so many variables. In fact, the majority of events must follow a set pattern to accomplish its goal. Through the implementation of an APM solution, any event or transaction that goes outside of these established patterns is viewed suspiciously, which then triggers an alert to be sent to network administrators. In many instances, an APM solution is the first line of defense against malicious attacks and/or fraud attempts.
  • Abnormal Requests – Let’s say that a financial institution has several applications in place. Throughout its monitoring history, the institution is able to determine the geographical area communications should be established. Since these parameters have been set, the institution can set up alerts to be sent if a request is made outside of a specific location, or if the request is sent at a particular time or is over a specific dollar amount. Once an “abnormal” request is identified, it can trigger the fraud alert. This element of protection is working hand-in-hand with established parameters to offer protection.
  • Cross-References Information – Application performance management tools have come a long way in recent years. In fact, many solutions are able to be connected to public databases, such as credit bureaus, to determine if information gathered through the application is accurate. Integrating third party authorization and reference checks are ideal for financial institutions or other companies who handle sensitive personal information. Being able to automatically cross-reference information and monitoring application performance in real time are among the most effective ways of securing your site and preventing fraud.

Essentials for Cloud Application Performance Management

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While you may feel confident in your ability to monitor and manage the performance of self-hosted applications, what happens when your applications begin transferring to the dynamic Cloud? Whether your enterprise is relatively new and small, or established and expansive, IT professionals must design not only their monitoring capabilities, but also the actual applications, to seamlessly integrate with cloud-based actions. The following are essential principles and best practices within the realm of application performance management in the cloud.

Determining if the Application is Suitable for the Cloud

The first step, before ever delving into the various cloud APM solutions, is determining if your application is suitable for the cloud. Not every application is designed to function properly via cloud-based hosting. Therefore, it’s imperative for the functionality of your website to review requirements for each application before integrating into your network, or before switching to cloud hosting.

In order for an application to perform at optimum levels, it requires a specific type of network architecture. The communication an application requires between the server and the host as well as the number of tier dependencies determines whether or not application performance will be hindered or enhanced. It’s essential to perform various cloud readiness checks before going live to determine if your current applications are appropriate.

Establish a Unified View Across Hybrid Enterprises

With the rising complexity in business service stacks, it’s essential that IT directors proactively manage cloud-based applications from end-to-end. When you have a complex network of applications, it’s essential to create a unified view across the entire cloud to effectively monitor, diagnose and repair applications. The ideal tool is one that provides real-time visibility into application performance, which then ensures an optimal experience from beginning-to-end. Granual end-to-end visibility is critical in determining the overall functionality and performance of applications. A unified view across hybrid environments, applications are able to be monitored and performed at premium performance levels for a satisfying end-user experience.

Continual End-User Perspective Monitoring

In the cloud, IT directors must monitor applications, not from the data center, but from the end-user perspective, regardless of where the actual application is sourced. In order to determine how cloud applications are interacting with your business demands, IT organizers must use non-intrusive technology to track and discover transactions and application performance, not from the back-end, but from the user’s perspective. There are a number of companies that allow applications to be continually monitored from a user perspective, such as Pingdom and Dotcom-Monitor.

 

The more dynamic environments and requirements from cloud applications require monitoring based upon the end-user experience. Therefore, it’s essential that your business integrate dynamic cloud-based monitoring solutions to track not only the end-user experience, but also how the IT infrastructure affects the functionality of each application.

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