Monitoring Solutions

GMS Application Performance Management (APM), focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and service availability of software applications.

APM is the process and use of related IT tools to detect, diagnose, remedy and report application’s performance to ensure that it meets or exceeds end-users’ and businesses’ expectations.

There are two main methods by which performance is assessed for production applications.  The first is measuring the resources utilised by the application from inception to its current state.  The second is measuring the response time of the applications from the perspective of the end user, giving an indication of what the end user experience is like while interacting with the application.

Focus Areas

Application Monitoring Maturity

This is a gap analysis. The question is : “Are you utilising your current monitoring investment to provide an End to End (ETE) solution and what key areas should be addressed to fill the gaps?”

Business Service Visualisation

All monitored IT metrics form part of some service that is delivered to a customer and as such you monitoring solution should be aligned with that service. Thus all components that are traversed within the IT stack when an end user transaction is executed should relate their performance and availability back to that Business Service.

Process, Best Practices, People

Without refined Processes and industry Best Practices and the right People to drive them, you will not realise the full potential of your Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution in the shortest amount of time while providing consistent value.

Benefit Realisation

We analyse any potential gaps in any given enterprise. We then see how these gaps can be addressed with our customer’s current tool / technology investment.

Implementation and Integration Services

For those areas that we cannot address with the in house tools we can advise and provide a variety of tools that will meet our customers various needs. We will also address any integration necessary to ensure that we can align all this data to provide a single Service Visualisation layer.

Application Performance Troubleshooting and Diagnostics

Here we provide you with tool sets and specialist skills that will aid in diagnosing Application and DB performance degradation in Dev/UAT and real time production.

Benefits

Mitigate Risk

When you have enterprise level monitoring available and working in a service orientated manner you can derive trends and understand each components impact on another.

You will now be able to identify the risk involved when you have Service performance degradation or Service outages.

Based on the information available to the customer, quick decisions can be made such as:

• Should you fail over to DR and what are the potential risks involved?
• Should a middleware instance be restarted?
• Should you increase the resources allocated to an environment?
• Could we roll out more products on a platform without impacting on other applications?

Time & Cost Reduction

• Operational – the quicker you can identify the area/s responsible for you service degradation the faster it can be resolved.
• Maintenance – the more automation, the less you need resources to attend to mundane and often time consuming daily tasks.
• Uptime – improved uptime and response will result in a decrease in revenue loss and an improved brand perception.
• Proactive Application Monitoring – using trends, known KPI’s and Service dependencies will enable you to start predicting when an outage will occur.
• Incident Reduction – identifying “Key Performance Indicators” proactively will result in less incidents being created, resulting in improved uptime.

Application Optimisation

A key are that time should be spent on is Application Optimisation. The reason for this is that a monitoring solution only provides you with the information you need to investigate any areas for possible optimisation, it does not resolve the issues. However, if you don’t optimise your Application you will never get to a point where you can reduce capital spend on maintenance and allocate it to new initiatives.

Improve Application Lifecycles

By improving your internal Application Lifecycles (Develop, Test, Live, Maintain) you will be in a position to accurately make a call (Go or no Go) whether or not you can take new functionality into production. This call is now based on the impact on the entire service and not only on an individual application or platform.

Visibility and Alignment

The key driving factor behind Application Performance Monitoring is the fact that all the monitored data is available in one single view. You can now effectively align Business and IT as you can link End User Transactions to IT components. This breaks down the historic silo centric approach toward monitoring and now provides views on:

• Executive Level - From an executive point of view you can see the health of your applications and whether or not your users can transact. Thus making the availability and performance of the business transparent.
• Management Level - From a management perspective you can see if your Service Levels are being met.
• Support Level - From a support point of view you can identify if the cause of an incident is within your environment or if it is external. You will also have the diagnostic views to enable you to identify the root cause of the problem.
• Help Desk -On the Help Desk level more accurate incidents will be generated as the breach of a KPI will now result back to a specific area within a service. The Help Desk will now also have a holistic view of all the components traversed for a specific application making it much easier to log tickets to the correct area / team where degradation is visible.