Tailor-made APM - equipped for the future with holistic service monitoring

In today's blog post, I explain how (IT) managers can ensure satisfied users with forward-looking IT service management and at the same time contribute to the economic success of their company. After all, one of the main challenges of our time is to process ever larger amounts of data in ever shorter time and to analyse them in a decision-supporting manner. Therefore, a modern monitoring solution for availability and performance is indispensable.

Whether employees, online customers or field staff - the internal and external users of a company expect all applications and infrastructure components to run with high performance. Always. If you want to have a complete 360° view of the IT and application landscape, you need a customised solution consisting of passive and active service monitoring. And with an intelligent analytics solution as the third component, all relevant data can be converted into meaningful information and presented in a clear manner. In this way, those responsible have an overview of all applications and components at all times and can make the right decisions at an early stage.

Cleverly combine and optimally analyse

For the users themselves, it is no longer a question that infrastructure components such as end devices and connections are always and everywhere available. Perfect service is expected: smoothly functioning applications have become a decisive competitive factor. In addition, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 (IIoT) have long since arrived in numerous industries, which in turn brings new challenges in terms of data quantity, quality and processing. Singular application performance monitoring (APM) solutions, conventional monitoring tools and special solutions, however, only ever manage a partial task. The solution: By combining active and passive service monitoring, the overall quality of IT service management is raised to a higher level.

Active service monitoring

Active service monitoring simulates typical user behaviour and records performance data: software robots interact with the applications - exactly as the end users do. In this way, (reference) values are generated around the clock, 365 days a year, even when the end users are not using the applications. The user processes are implemented as so-called scripts. These are programmes that execute predefined, typical user actions at regular intervals. This can be, for example, visiting a specific web page in the product configuration, calling up an app, opening a Word document or making a specific booking in a company's SAP system.

Passive service monitoring

Passive service monitoring provides the view of 'real' users. Monitoring tools collect performance data on the end devices of real users and transfer it to a central storage location (local or in the cloud). There, the measured values are processed and the analysis results are made available. Complete information is obtained about how real users experience the performance and availability of the monitored application. With passive tools for monitoring availability and performance, a distinction is made between application-centric monitoring and client-based monitoring - each of which has advantages and disadvantages, which I would be happy to explain to you in more detail if you are interested.

Analytics - more than business intelligence

Traditional approaches to optimising the performance of business-critical applications are no longer sufficient: The complexity of IT infrastructures is increasing at breakneck speed and the configuration of IT is extremely dynamic. It becomes particularly problematic when companies lose fundamental know-how about their application landscape and IT infrastructure - be it due to incomplete documentation or the departure of experienced employees.

The increasingly virtualised infrastructures as well as the trends towards cloud and container technologies inevitably lead to enormous amounts of structured and unstructured data. This enables and requires novel, data-driven optimisation approaches as well as new services.

The main goals here are:

• The systematic and timely generation of new knowledge to continuously improve the quality and performance of applications.
• An optimisation of the costs for the IT infrastructure.

Classical Business Intelligence (BI) applications often reach their limits here due to technical weaknesses. The real-time analysis of unstructured data in particular is only possible with analytics solutions. They enable the real-time evaluation of large quantities of structured and unstructured data from a multitude of very different data sources. These data are transmitted via various protocols or also agents that deliver the measured values from the systems. They are summarised in real time, analysed with regard to any anomalies and correlated with historical patterns. The results are presented in clear diagrams, tables and overviews.

My conclusion: Innovative service monitoring pays off! Because it goes far beyond the performance of conventional monitoring tools. It can be used flexibly and for any form of IT infrastructure - including virtualisation, cloud and containers. For companies, this is more than "just" a reliable, seamless monitoring solution for the performance and availability of business-critical applications: Modern service monitoring makes a significant contribution to overall economic success and is an elementary building block for future-oriented IT.