Balancing cost and risk of implementing APM

IT leaders are consistently focused on decisions on the balance of cost and risk. The result of this balancing act on the application performance life cycle impact decisions on:

• Do we do performance testing for the next release of an application set?
• How big should my performance test environment be?
• If my performance test environment is not the same size as production, will guesses on capacity and performance be accurate?
• Do I leverage performance modeling as part of my APM life cycle?
• Do we choose to implement open source server monitoring solutions or do I need a solution that is more robust? How much am I willing to spend?
• When there is a critical event, can my team find the root cause quickly?
• How much of the time of my engineers needs to be spent on trouble-shooting?

I find that having a strategy for the Application Performance Management Life Cycle helps the IT executive feel comfortable that the answers are optimized.