Imagine all your users were retail customers

Actually, they are. And they expect you to manage your internal systems as if they are customers of every other retail site they visit. They may not be able to go to another competitor for the information that is on your intranet or provided by internal applications, but you can bet they wish they could if the availability or performance is not great. So what would you do if the internal systems were retail systems.

• You would monitor the end-user experience for health and performance
• You would communicate clearly and with advanced notice if there were planned maintenance periods or surprise outages
• You would make the look and feel of internal sites attractive and highly usable
• You would find ways to minimize the mean time to repair when there are issues through integrated monitoring and training on how to diagnose issues

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.