Study Shows Need for Infrastructure Plus Application Performance Views

Infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring: You Shouldn't Have One without the Other

Many enterprises zero in on watching either infrastructure or application performance. Based on results from NetForecast's latest application performance management benchmarking survey, we can unequivocally say that those with a "stereoscopic" view of infrastructure as well as application performance achieve dramatically better results than those with a "monoscopic" view of just one or the other. So if you are focusing on only one view, we suggest you get with the program and expand to a more holistic, dual view of performance. Here's the data that shows why this is smart.

Those enterprises in our recent APM benchmarking survey with access to both infrastructure and application performance views resolved performance problems dramatically faster than their single-view-enabled counterparts. The typical time needed to resolve a critical application incident for those with a single view was a whopping 11 hours, while those with a dual view improved by 40 percent to seven hours.

The percent of performance problems discovered by IT rather than end users also increased for those with a dual rather than single view of performance. Those watching both infrastructure and application performance discovered performance problems proactively 47 percent of the time rather than 37 percent of the time for those enterprises with a single view--a 29 percent improvement. Not bad!

Nearly all of the single-view enterprises rely solely on infrastructure tools for their performance information. For most single-view enterprises, expanding to a dual view means adding application or end-user performance information to infrastructure information. This more comprehensive approach brings to light 54 percent more performance incidents. Those with a single view detected 28 critical application incidents per month on average, compared to 43 for those with a dual view. Clearly performance incidents discovered by application-centric monitoring tools remain undetected by enterprises relying only on infrastructure-centric performance monitoring tools. This means that 35% of performance incidents go undetected!

If you rely on a monoscopic view, this should keep you awake at night and should kick start you to lobby your boss to expand your performance management tool arsenal to include application as well as infrastructure views.

Let us know what you think of our findings.

• Network Management
• Infrastructure Management