NetForecast Publishes APM Best Practices Benchmarking Report

Best practices lead to 75 percent better performance results

This week NetForecast publishes a free report detailing the findings of our recent APM best practices benchmarking survey. The results document how, compared to enterprises with poor APM best practices benchmark scores, top-scoring enterprises experience 75 percent fewer critical application problems, are 75 percent more likely to learn about performance problems proactively rather than from user complaints, and typically spend four hours resolving an application performance problem, compared to 16 hours for low scorers. Download the report here.

NetForecast has benchmarked more than 1,000 enterprises. The NetForecast survey results show that most high-performing enterprises use two or at most three performance management tools. When multiple tools are used, one tool generally is used to monitor infrastructure performance, and another to monitor application performance to provide a "stereoscopic" view of performance. In addition, survey results show that of the vendors most frequently used by top-performers, NetScout tops the list, followed by BMC, NetIQ, NetQoS, and Quest Software.

The report describes how good performance management builds on good tools--but no matter how great your tools, they are of limited value without good process. Four years of survey results clearly show that implementing best practices is more important than what tools you own. Best practices are what your staff does, and you can benefit from the best APM practices without using any tools at all. If you already have tools, when your team implements best practices you may learn how the tools should be used differently, upgraded, or replaced.

The report recommends that you rank how well you perform each of four NetForecast APM best practices and determine how to improve the best practices you are not adequately supporting. Your company's position on the four best practices benchmarks will tell you where your APM processes stand relative to your peers. This is an easy way to find the most effective improvements to manage IT performance. Improvements may be minor, like improving communication to other parts of your organization. Or they may be major, like engaging business managers to hammer out what matters most to the business and how to measure it.

Finally, when shopping for a new APM tool, first document specific best practice improvement goals associated with its deployment. Otherwise you are just shopping for a cool new gadget with no idea how it will improve your bottom line. In the end, it should be all about the business.

• Network Management
• Application Management