Last week we laid out the subset of ITIL processes that define the essential building blocks of performance management (PM). You probably already operate some of these management processes - incident, availability, capacity and service level. But you probably also have been polishing just one side of your IT coin by applying these processes to a single aspect of performance: just to assets or just to information flows. It's time to look at the big performance management picture.

Performance management has two equally valuable and mutually dependent aspects that we describe as "columns" (infrastructure) and "rows" (flows). If you are like most IT professionals, you are applying performance management either to columns, expecting that if all is well with each column then the user experience is as good as it can get - or to rows, expecting that if the user experience is within norms then the infrastructure must be running well. Although both views are valuable, when looked at independently, each delivers only half of the big picture. Without both views, you invite panicked all-hands-on-deck emergencies.

By gathering data and delivering reports on both views, you are putting together the two halves of performance management into the big picture shown below.

As the figure shows, you can apply the same PM building blocks (incident, availability, capacity and service level management) to columns or rows. Most enterprises and management tool vendors start by applying PM to columns, thus putting in place infrastructure performance management (IPM). This can achieve good IT asset efficiency, which is why most IPM sales pitches talk about the great return on investment you will experience when you tune the assets to just stay ahead of resource needs. On the other hand, measuring and tracking rows provides the clearest insights into the actual user experience - which is application performance management (APM). Here the sales pitch is that the user is able to do more with the application so they can generate in more revenue.

Put simply, good IPM saves money and good APM makes money. Now you can see why you really need both. But most organizations do not cover both or if they do, the coverage is not balanced. Which side are you managing?