by Michael Procopio

Network World editor Denise Dubie assessed a report by the analyst firm Aberdeen Group  in her recent article Application performance management: Keeping an eye on the end-user prize.  Her comments mirrored many of those I have spoken with recently who have said their top priorities this are year are revenue and removing any distractions from making revenue.

What was pleasant to see was data showing the end user performance is still important. More frustrating to see was that business and IT managers still differ in their priority of what needs to be measured, according to the article. As you might guess, business folks are more concerned with business processes while IT folks are more concerned with the infrastructure. One-step down from that the article covers the specifics of how each group prioritized how to do application performance monitoring.

Both end user and infrastructure monitoring are critical. Recently, at HP Software Universe in a talk I gave with a customer he showed this picture.

This does a good job of making the point that end user monitoring is critical. Since there are multiple pieces to the IT part of the puzzle, cumulative effect is important.

This customer said when he took his job there was a Severity 1 (highest priority) problem meeting everyday with typically greater than 10 "Sev 1" items. Today he has no meetings and approximately one Sev 1 per week.

How did he get here, monitoring the infrastructure. He said when they tracked down the source of the problem they put in a new infrastructure monitor for the item that failed, so he got early warning. But even in his current state he commented that end user monitoring is important because things change, whether it is a new version of the application or a change in the infrastructure that create a situation where something can go wrong that isn't currently being monitored.

For the Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

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