Performance management (or performance monitoring as it is sometimes called) is the protocol set in place to monitor the performance of different services. There are three primary performance management tools: application performance management (APM), network performance management (NPM), and unified performance management (UPM), which combines APM and NPM into one comprehensive tool.
APM tools, which are agent-based, provide visibility into applications and which events stall in the application’s performance. NPM, on the other hand, focuses on network outages and bottlenecks. AppDynamics further clarifies the difference between APM and NPM by noting that NPM “tools are agent-less appliances that sit on the network analyzing content and traffic by capturing packets flowing through the network.” By collecting essential data on the network, IT professionals have insight into the problem so that they can brainstorm a game plan to resolve the performance issue.
These tools prevent headaches to both the providers and the end-users. Here is a quick summary of the benefits of performance management.
Source IDC.
Five Benefits of Performance Management
- Performance management tools give valuable insight into network issues.
- It provides improved quality of service to end-users.
- Ixia pointed out that “proactive monitoring provides better and faster network rollouts by pre-testing the network with synthetic traffic to understand how it performs against either specific application traffic or a combination of traffic types.”
- Performance management increases employee productivity by offering a more robust tool that gives a comprehensive glimpse into performance. “IDC calculates that these organizations are achieving productivity gains. worth an average of $4,613 per 100 users, or $1.56 million per organization, over three years.” When employees don’t have to spend valuable time diagnosing the issue, because the APM or NPM tool does it for them, they can turn their attention to solving the problem quickly and then redirect their efforts back to other projects and priorities. This, in turn, boosts the organization’s ROI.
- According to Forrester, “service outage events can cost companies millions per year.” Monitoring issues that cause service outages also save an organization significant costs.