By Denny LeCompte, general manager, application
management, SolarWinds
Remaining
competitive in business landscapes has never been more difficult; to succeed in
today's increasingly saturated markets, organizations must deliver not only top
products and services, but also a customer experience rivaling competitors and
exceeding expectations. Success lies in business performance, which makes
performance monitoring tools and application performance management (APM) key
to overall business success.
Every organization is unique, which is
reflected in their use of APM tools. A new GigaOm report, Driving
Business Performance Through Application Performance Management,
sponsored by SolarWinds®, surveyed executive leaders to
discover how performance management strategies differed based on whether
organizations used them proactively or reactively.
One common thread between organizations,
however, is that they have these tools and solutions in place. Organizations
with large staff and high budget to devote to creating an exceptional customer
experience often leverage robust APM tools and features, as a simple-yet-powerful APM suite can bring the end-user
experience to the next level. This can ultimately give them a leg up on
competition.
Organizations with smaller budgets and
fewer staff members also leverage APM tools to meet their greatest need, which
is largely streamlining troubleshooting. Simple,
affordable APM tools can make quick fixes even quicker, which is of paramount
importance when time to resolution is everything.
With the complexities
and expenses stemming from managing custom applications and websites across
every type or organization-the new normal for nearly all of today's technology
professionals-APM tools are key to business performance.
Key
Findings
By
surveying executives across organizations, the report revealed different ways
performance management strategies can be used to meet business goals.
Primary
Driver of Application Performance Management Tools and Strategies
- The primary driver, according to
61 percent of executive decision makers from reactive organizations, is to
diagnose and fix problems; this is followed by managing complex
application environments (57 percent).
Prioritization
of Criteria Related to Customer Experience
- 66 percent of proactive
organizations see customer experience criteria as important.
Most
Important Features of APM Tools
- 65 percent of proactive
organizations have comprehensive performance monitoring coverage of the
DevOps toolchain, compared to 18 percent of reactive organizations.
- Proactive organizations
consistently value more advanced APM features (54 percent), such as
measuring user experience in real time (44 percent); providing a composite
view of log and performance data (35 percent); and having a ‘live tail'
feed of logs and other data sources (32 percent).
Regardless
of how they're used, APM tools can streamline troubleshooting and amplify the
customer experience. In addition to meeting customer priorities
and making tech pros' lives easier as the business landscape they support
evolves, APM tools can also meet key performance indicators and achieve broader
business goals-key to the success of every organization.
This makes finding the right APM tool
key to every organization.
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About the Author
A former university professor, Denny is a passionate advocate for optimizing technologies to solve critical customer problems, leveraging empirical, data-driven approaches. His thoughtful leadership and disciplined methodologies have guided product management, product marketing, and User Experience (UX) teams to develop creative product strategies that ignited rapid business growth and made customers’ lives easier.
In his current role as Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at SolarWinds, Denny leads a global organization responsible for customer research, engagement, and product positioning. While helping identify new customer needs and opportunities, his team works to educate and inform the market on how SolarWinds IT management software simplifies the process of running complex systems and applications with high availability and reliability.
In addition to SolarWinds, Denny held executive leadership roles at leading IT management and security firms, including BMC and AlienVault. Denny holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Rice University and a B.S. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.