Forrester: Becoming Proactive in APM.

Becoming Proactive In Application
Performance Management
The Business Impact Of Application Reliability Requires A Holistic Approach
A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Compuware Corporation July 2008
Becoming Proactive In Application Performance Management
Table Of Contents
Executive Summary ...............................................................................................................................3
Complexity Gets In The Way.............................................................................................................5
Understanding The Business Impact ................................................................................................9
Manage Application Performance Holistically .....................................................................................12
Outside-In Service Management.....................................................................................................12
Only The End-User Experience Matters .........................................................................................12
Become More Proactive ..................................................................................................................13
Improve Your Troubleshooting Capabilities....................................................................................13
Optimize Application Performance..................................................................................................13
Summary And Forrester Recommendations.......................................................................................14
Apply Business Level Agreements Not SLAs.................................................................................14
Appendix: Methodology........................................................................................................................15
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- 2 - Becoming Proactive In Application Performance Management
Executive Summary Many IT organizations have now established effective monitoring systems for the various infrastructure domains in an enterprise-wide IT landscape: servers, storage, network, peripherals and desktops. The management of application performance, however, is more complicated and does not yet reflect this maturity. There is no holistic view of application performance management and most IT Operations groups are not equipped to be proactive enough to anticipate issues before end users call the help desk.
Compuware Corporation commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey 389 global technology decision-makers actively involved in application performance management (APM) to assess the effectiveness of their processes and the technologies they employ. These decision-makers were asked about their application performance management processes, which technologies they used and the challenges they faced.
A major paradox emerging from the survey is that 87% of the respondents replied that they are using end user experience monitoring tools for at least some business critical applications but, in a later question, 64% of them admit that they only know that end users are experiencing performance or availability problems when the end users register a complaint with the help desk. Forrester believes that most of the enterprises consider application management tools to be their end user experience monitors and have not yet taken advantage of new technologies which really do monitor the true end user experience including the effect of network, servers, databases and applications.
In summary, the key findings from the survey are:
. IT is still taking a reactive, firefighting ... [download for more]