Application Performance Management Enables DevOps ROI
May 01, 2015

Gabriel Lowy
TechTonics

More organizations are discovering the efficiencies of adopting DevOps practices for application lifecycle management. As they do, they realize that Application Performance Management (APM) enables DevOps ROI (return on investment).

Large enterprises typically run multi-tiered applications across a variety of systems and platforms. These can range from in-house mainframes to external clouds. With the accelerating usage of cloud-based apps, the complexity of integrating these applications is a challenge for even the most sophisticated IT teams.

Greater agility is the underlying business case for a DevOps approach. Leveraging increased automation, DevOps applies agile and lean practices throughout the software lifecycle. It allows IT to launch higher quality applications and deploy them faster than in the past.

The Key to Better Performing Applications

APM is integral to helping companies realize ROI on their DevOps initiatives. By moving performance analytics forward in the development lifecycle, DevOps teams can discover dependencies to learn how an application will perform once it goes “live”. Metrics derived from continuous transaction monitoring act as an early warning system for operational or quality issues – before the application is released into production. These metrics can then be used to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) against which the production environment can be measured.

Rather than waiting for post-production performance data to analyze what went wrong, the DevOps team can build performance analytics models that can anticipate operational and quality problems before the delivery phase. As production metrics more consistently adhere to KPIs, application performance – and user experience – improves.

Sharing the data with line of business teams at this stage accelerates the feedback loop from the various application stakeholders. These can include internal users, customers and partners. This feedback is essential for all constituents to make changes about what capabilities the application should have. The DevOps team can then make adjustments faster and with less stress while maintaining focus on optimizing the user experience.

Closer collaboration between development, operations and quality assurance teams can alleviate other issues as well. Silos of performance data held by different teams – infrastructure, server, network, virtualization or application – can be integrated into a higher-level view. As stand-alone data sets, their benefits are diluted by their incompatibility. This is a common problem with point solutions. While each may be separately indicating good application performance, the user experience may still be poor.

Related to this silo issue is that each of these solutions comes with its own console. Their incompatibility can generate many false positives. IT teams will often get frustrated and eventually ignore most of the alerts they receive.

Meanwhile, performance continues to suffer. Internal users abandon the application, eroding productivity. Customers grow frustrated and leave the site, costing revenue and reputational damage.

Benefits of an Integrated APM Platform

This data only begins to yield meaningful insights when it’s integrated into a unified strategic framework. A unified platform approach to assuring user experience allows performance metrics from the DevOps process to be correlated with post-production data.

Information about how users engage with an application and the feedback those users provide about their experience are most valuable for the DevOps team. These include metrics such as the number of tickets generated due to user complaints, adds, drops or changes that occur in the normal course of business, or customer comments in app stores or on social media.

A unified platform with advanced performance analytics provides IT teams with operational intelligence about user experience at the point of engagement. They allow triage techniques to pinpoint the root cause of performance issues in real time to accelerate troubleshooting and mean time to repair (MTTR). The “R” in MTTR really refers to “reliability”. All of this performance data then cycles back to the DevOps team so that processes can be refined to improve agility.

A unified APM platform that enhances user experience directly correlates to the enterprise product life cycle. Companies can realize faster time to value by accelerating product development and launches. User experience that consistently meets or exceeds customer expectations builds loyalty and strengthens competitiveness. ROI improves through reduced costs, enhanced productivity and new revenue streams. Better application performance also mitigates risks, such as uncompleted transactions, reputational damage or compliance violations.

Gabriel Lowy is the founder of TechTonics Advisors, a research-first investor relations consultancy that helps technology companies maximize value for all stakeholders by bridging vision, strategy, product portfolio and markets with analysts and investors
Share this

Industry News

March 30, 2023

CloudBees announced the integration of CloudBees’ continuous delivery and release orchestration solution, CloudBees CD/RO, with Argo Rollouts.

March 30, 2023

amazee.io, a Mirantis company, announced that its fully-managed application delivery platform is available in AWS Marketplace.

March 30, 2023

env0 secured an additional $18.1 million of funding to conclude its Series A investment round with a total of $35.1 million.

March 29, 2023

Planview announced a new strategic collaboration with UiPath. The integration is designed to fuse the UiPath Business Automation Platform with the Planview Value Stream Management (VSM) solution Planview® Tasktop Hub.

March 29, 2023

Noname Security announced major enhancements to its API security platform to help organizations protect their API ecosystem, secure their applications, and increase cyber resilience.

March 28, 2023

Mirantis announced the latest version of Mirantis Container Cloud -- MCC 2.23 -- that simplifies operations with the ability to monitor applications performance with a new Grafana dashboard and to make updates to Kubernetes clusters with a one-click “upgrade” button from a web interface.

March 28, 2023

Pegasystems announced updates to Pega Cloud supported by an enhanced Global Operations Center to deliver a more scalable, reliable, and secure foundation for its suite of AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation solutions.

March 28, 2023

D2iQ announced the launch of DKP Gov, a new container-management solution optimized for deployment within the government sector.

March 28, 2023

StackHawk announced the availability of StackHawk Pro and StackHawk Enterprise for trial and purchase through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

March 27, 2023

Octopus Deploy announced the results KinderSystems has seen working with Octopus. Through the use of Octopus, KinderSystems automates its software deployment processes to meet the complex needs of its customers and reduce the time to deploy software.

March 27, 2023

Elastic Path announced Integrations Hub, a library of instant-on, no-code integrations that are fully managed and hosted by Elastic Path.

March 27, 2023

Yugabyte announced key updates to YugabyteDB Managed, including the launch of the YugabyteDB Managed Command Line Interface (CLI).

March 23, 2023

Ambassador Labs released Telepresence for Docker, designed to make it easy for developer teams to build, test and deliver apps at scale across Kubernetes.

March 23, 2023

Fermyon Technologies introduced Spin 1.0, a major new release of the serverless functions framework based on WebAssembly.

March 23, 2023

Torc announced the acquisition of coding performance measurement application Codealike to empower software developers with even more data that increases skills, job opportunities and enterprise value.