'The More the Merrier' Doesn't Apply to Management Tools

Two or three performance management tools are all you need

You may be yearning to buy management tools from yet another vendor, but NetForecast's recent survey of performance management best practices and their results shows that using more management tools is not necessarily better. Most high-performing enterprises use two or at most three vendors, while low-performing enterprises use one or two. The takeaway is that most enterprises need at least two and no more than three vendors to achieve good application performance results. And if you have stellar best practices, you can get by with one vendor.

The finding that two vendors are required for good APM results dovetails with findings cited in our last posting, that to ensure optimal performance you need two tools--one for monitoring infrastructure performance and another for monitoring application performance. The resulting stereoscopic view ensures that you are able to solve more problems faster.

Here is the distribution of benchmarking scores across the survey population, showing low-performing and high-performing groupings. Our previous blog on the topic shows that enterprises with a benchmark score above six really do deliver better performance for their users--75% better performance. Even though enterprises in the high group got there primarily through best practices, it is also important to factor in the management vendors they use to support those best practices.

Figure 1: Application Performance Benchmark Score Results

The figure below shows the association between the number of management vendors used and benchmark results. You can see that scores improve with the number of vendors deployed up to three, and that among the very highest performing enterprises the vendor count dips precipitously. We postulate that the highest-performing enterprises get good results with fewer vendors because they have very effective APM processes (i.e., best practices) in place.

Figure 2: Performance Management Tool Vendor Count versus Performance Score

Based on our survey results and experience, we conclude that if you want to be a high-performing enterprise, you need the stereoscopic view provided by two performance management tools--one providing an infrastructure-centric view, and the other an application-centric view, and you need best practices. The number of vendors required to get the stereoscopic view is evolving as vendors develop new and more comprehensive tools.

In our next installment, we will tell you which vendors are associated with the best APM benchmark results.

• Application Management