What is Application Performance Monitoring & Why It Matters Way More Than You Think
Like most commercial businesses, government organizations now must find ways to leverage technology to lower the costs of revenue generation/collection, and of customer support. One state CIO for example knows that the state’s cost to process a resident’s auto registration online jumps by 6 or 7 orders of magnitude if that resident struggles with the online registration and calls in for help, or even worse, walks into a departmental office. Traditional IT monitoring and management approaches are insufficient on their own to address modern application challenges like this, and are now regularly augmented with Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions.
At the core, APM is simply another paradigm for managing information technology. Unlike traditional monitoring paradigms, modern APM leads to rapid, tangible improvement in Business-IT Alignment. There is no single unified definition promoted by vendors and analysts alike, but in the end, APM is clearly about focusing the attention on the application, as opposed to just the infrastructure elements underneath.
As IT professionals, we design, deploy and manage applications and services. The systems infrastructure we cable together underneath those applications is simply a means to an end. Many years ago, the systems themselves were synonymous with the application, and you could walk into any datacenter and point to “the server” that was a given application. However, just as the technology has since evolved from mainframes, to mid-range servers, to client/server processing, to application stacks and service oriented architecture, our IT management perspective must also change from systems and infrastructure to the application or service that the end-user interacts with. Now more than ever, we must recognize that users interact with applications, rather than with “servers” or “systems”.
On top of all of this, the application is also the only true constant in the technology equation as the bulk of our infrastructure becomes dynamic, virtualized and fluid, eventually moving in part or in full to the cloud. Like the technology, IT professionals too must evolve and fully embrace the application perspective, or rest assured we become irrelevant to the businesses we support. The next question is, how do we transition from an infrastructure to an application centric perspective? Believe it or not, with the right management technology and a few process changes, the answer is easier than you think.
Presented by:
Vice President & General Manager
Application Management Business Unit
Quest Software
John Newsom is vice president and general manager of the Application Management business unit at Quest Software. He has global responsibility for the business unit, including product management, R&D, marketing, sales, professional services and technical support. John drives both the vision/roadmap, as well as the execution toward that vision for Quest’s Application Management solutions, centered around the Foglight solution for Application and Services Management, and STAT solution for Application Change Lifecycle Management.
John provides a unique combination of technical depth, exceptional communication skills, and broad market awareness from years of extensive enterprise customer engagement. He has been with Quest for more than 14 years and has held numerous senior management positions, including vice president, Worldwide Solutions Engineering, in which he was responsible for Quest Professional Services, solution architecture and presales engineering; and vice president, Americas and Asia-Pacific Sales. Prior to Quest, John spent 11 years in Silicon Valley in various software development and program management roles for Tandem Computers and Dalmo Victor. John holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science, with minors in mathematics and electrical engineering from California State University, Chico, and is ITIL certified.
