Behemoths and little guys do a better job of application performance management than mid-sized enterprises. That's what we found in our last benchmarking survey of enterprise application performance management practices. Enterprises with more than 10,000 or fewer than 1,000 employees achieved better scores for application performance management best practices than those with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees (see figure below). Why should that be? Here's our theory about why big and small enterprises are doing better job of application performance management than their mid-sized counterparts.
You can see that for "good" benchmark scores of between 5 and 8, mid-sized enterprises are in a trough between their small and big brethren. Small fry dominate in scores of 5 and 6, but by higher scores of 7 and 8 they flip positions with the big guys. Small and large enterprises are equally represented in this range and each has nearly 50% more representation than the medium enterprises. Something is clearly putting the mid-sized enterprise at a disadvantage.
Small enterprises tend to have simple networks with few people involved in their care and feeding. This makes it comparatively easy to understand what's going on in the network and to fix application performance problems before, or when they go critical. Big enterprises, in contrast, usually have complex networks with large numbers of applications running over them--but they usually have invested lots of money in tools and people devoted to the health and well-being of networks and applications. Big enterprises have also usually applied a semblance of order to managing application performance and are thus favorably positioned for good results. Medium-sized enterprises, on the other hand, are often caught in a bind. Their networks and organizations are generally growing more complex, they have lots of applications and users, yet they routinely lack tools and are short of the manpower needed to manage application performance in an exemplary way. This doesn't have to be so.
We believe that with thought and planning, mid-sized enterprises can use inexpensive tools and smart processes to get out of the trough they are in. One such tool is the Science Logic EM7 management appliance that uses a simple architecture to start small and grow by adding appliances to more locations if needed. The EM7 operates as data collector, centralized database and application/report server. As the enterprise grows, you can extend these functions as tiers across locations, business units, data centers, security restricted zones, etc., and all of the functions operate as a unified system with little configuration overhead. The system auto-discovers infrastructure and dynamically starts to report on a vast array of devices and applications. All four of what we define as the APM building blocks--event, availability, capacity, and service level management--are bundled into one box that is uniquely designed to support the mid-sized enterprise.
But even EM7 customers must invest in the people and process side of APM. The good news on that front is the product frees IT staff time from management system configuration, and that time can be devoted to planning and implementing process. Also, money saved on software licenses can instead be applied to head count. The takeaway is that a smart middle-sized company isn't destined to be an also ran when it comes to application performance management.
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