Nine Performance Management Use Cases

The performance management use cases reveal the different aspects that IT professionals need to monitor to ensure a healthy network. Performance management is a useful tool for pinpointing any issues that bog down network performance. There are two main types of performance management tools, application performance management (APM), and network performance management (NPM). And an emerging tool converges APM and NPM into what is called unified performance management (UPM), which monitors both an application’s performance along with the network’s performance.

Performance management tools discover issues with the network performance by conducting a root cause analysis. The root cause analysis informs IT professionals exactly where the obstacle is to alleviate the problem.

Nine Performance Management Use Cases:

Here are some of the most common performance management use cases.

1. User Experience Monitoring is one of the most critical components of performance management. Monitoring user experience prevents any hindrance an issue may cause to the end-user.
2. Cloud-based App Monitoring specifically deals with end-to-end performance of all the cloud types: public, private, and hybrid.
3. Business Impact Monitoring determines network performance variations’ impact on business operations, including to internal staff, customers, and partners.
4. Network Usage Reporting tracks which departments within an enterprise use networking resources.
5. Security Enablement focuses on security analysis for applications and networks to diagnose any weak points that might be susceptible to attacks. The 2016 Presidential Policy Directive for Security Sector Assistance notes that performance management for assessing security plans is beneficial because monitoring network performance informs decision-making and resource allocation when it comes to security measures.
6. End-to-End Service Assurance is another comprehensive monitoring system across services, devices, and networks. One of the goals of end-to-end service assurance, according to Monolith Software, is to “offer value-added services with their own service level guarantees that can be measured, managed, and reported.”
7. Converged Infrastructure Monitoring is the process of merging the various performance management tools into one dashboard for IT professionals to monitor all tools at once.
8. Service Quality Management monitors infrastructure, particularly aimed at video and network resources that assess the end-user’s delivery.
9. Capacity Planning/Auto-Scaling benchmarks trends in network and application performance to target the number of networking resources needed, with a focus on how to be cost-efficient during network upgrades. Cisco points out this best practice when it comes to capacity planning, “the network organization should start by defining a capacity planning and performance management service that includes what aspects of the service they can currently provide and what is planned in the future.”