* Research firm stresses importance of testing Web-enabled applications
It’s no surprise more companies are depending on Web-enabled applications, but a recent paper questions whether they are putting the extra effort in presenting the best Web face for their business.
It’s no surprise more companies are depending on Web-enabled applications, but a recent paper questions whether they are putting the extra effort in presenting the best Web face for their business.
According to a new report from APM Advisors, the Web-enablement of applications has companies from all vertical markets scrambling to get a handle on how well applications perform for their customers. And despite their many efforts, the research firm suggests they may not be working.
“Companies need a new approach that allows them to understand the performance of the ‘face’ they present to their customers, and how that performance ties back to the infrastructure that supports their Web applications,” says Lynn Nye, president and founder of APM Advisors.
Some approaches include synthetic testing, but critics argue that doesn’t give an accurate representation of traffic at any given time. Other tactics involve a lot of pre-production testing of applications and the Web environment they live in. But even the most rigorous testing cannot account for every circumstance or condition a customer could experience when using a Web application.
A few reasons older management approaches might not work with new Web-enabled applications, Nye says, include the fact that customers can access these applications from any computer and from any place in the world with an Internet connection. That means the type of service should not vary based on the customer location, but service levels depend on criteria outside the data center. Also, Web-enabled applications run on a distributed multi-tier architecture that is “far more complex” that LAN-based and more homogeneous applications. And the tools used to approach application management in the past were resource-oriented, Nye says, and didn’t scale to understand a true end-to-end perspective.
Enterprise IT managers will need to better instrument their networks for optimized application performance on the LAN, the WAN and on a Web site facing customers, APM Advisors says. Tools need to show the infrastructure performance against the end-user experience and compare that to pre-set business objectives. Silos need to come down and data needs to be shared among infrastructure and application systems to truly understand how well a business’ face is presented to customers.
“With the clear definition of the application architecture, IT can now achieve a very high degree of instrumented granularity,” Nye says. “IT can watch virtually every transaction and understand how those transactions are correlated against other user experiences. And the business can monitor the relationships between performance and metrics such as revenue, productivity and customer satisfaction.”
