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

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.