Application Monitoring: Watching the User's Experience

Computerworld - If bottlenecks and bugs in your systems were frustrating employees and annoying customers, would you even know? Or would you be oblivious? Realizing that it's better to have some visibility into the end-user experience, many IT managers are turning to application performance management (APM) software and services. APM allows managers to keep tabs on how well Internet and other applications are working by continuously monitoring end users' experiences. The products and services can measure the performance of a Web site or an application in terms of response time and availability, identify the cause of trouble and often recommend fixes.
APM software and services began to appear in the late 1990s, as demand grew for tools that could give managers a user's-eye view of applications. Most of the systems management products introduced earlier in the decade monitored things like network and database availability but didn't measure how applications were performing and how well they were supporting business processes.
With APM tools, IT managers can determine whether an application or a Web site isn't performing well. Because a high level of performance of many applications is critical for business, industry experts expect growing demand for APM offerings and similar products.
Numerous vendors are trying to address the demand, offering products that monitor everything from search engines to enterprise resource planning software. Technology managers are generally pleased with the products' ability to manage applications, though they say there's room for improvement.
But what the software does, it does very well, users say. The Detroit Medical Center, which encompasses seven hospitals, two nursing centers and more than 100 outpatient clinics in the Detroit area, is using APM software from Compuware Corp. in Farmington Hills, Mich., to monitor and manage multiple Windows and Web applications running on its clinical information system database. The clinical system runs the business processes for all the medical center's departments and is accessed by about 8,200 users, including physicians and nurses.
The APM software allows managers to track performance, response times and availability for front-end applications running on the network, as well as the database servers they're linked to, says Joe Francis, director of applications. The software "tells us exactly what the users are experiencing, how long response times are and when the application is down," he says. "We're able to tell whenever there are changes from a performance standpoint."
Identifying Trouble Spots
Insurance company Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. in New York is also relying on APM, using software from Mercury Interactive Corp. in Sunnyvale, Calif., to manage insurance and