* Quest Software enhances Foglight tool to provide better business visibility
Pity the IT manager who has known of application performance shortcomings but has not delivered that information to the business — only to be called out on it anyways. Ouch.
Much better is to have confidence in your performance data and to share that data in a strategic way. Go to the business with the facts: “Hey, we know users were experiencing application performance problems six months ago. Here’s why, and here’s what we’ve done to fix the issues — and, to boot, here’s the data showing all of this.”
And this is about more than delivering IT metrics to the business; that doesn’t do any good if IT doesn’t really understand the business after all, says Brad Micklea, director of product management at Quest Software, maker of the Foglight application performance monitoring tool.
Rather, he says, application performance monitoring tools need to enable IT to deliver meaningful business data, and in real time rather than days or weeks after the fact. This would include metrics such as abandonment rates and conversation ratios, Micklea says.
Quest further addresses such needs in its latest edition of Foglight. The new enhancements wrap in analytics capabilities that allow enterprises to manage online revenue and conversion rates in real time, analyze trends in customer buying patterns and understand how application usability, performance, functionality and content affect conversion rates, he says.
Among other new features, the new Foglight version includes enhanced management visibility coupled with role-based workflow support and drap-and-drop features. The goal, in part, was to make the dashboards, which are customizable by user type — executive, line-of-business manager, IT operations and support — simple not only to configure but for interaction, plus “less jargon-y,” Micklea says.”Customers have told us, ‘Make the metrics simple and clear and don’t require us to have an expert on staff and certainly not five on your consultants to come onsite,'” he says.
The new version also lets users subscribe to alerts on critical services and to integrate with existing monitoring tools, among other enhancements.
