Over the last two years, technology vendors have been moving away from using the term "network monitoring" and replacing it with "application performance management." The main reason is that the performance of corporate networks is increasingly measured by the performance of the applications delivered over those networks. As a result, businesses are replacing familiar network-specific metrics, such as network uptime and time to troubleshoot network performance issues, with metrics like application availability and quality of experience as key performance indicators on their networks.

These changes are forcing vendors to enhance their product portfolios and provide more capabilities for monitoring the performance of networked applications in terms of measuring how fast information is delivered to end users via the network, the application itself or the Web services infrastructure, and pointing to possible problems. New opportunities are also being created in the emerging applications performance management (APM) market, including providing it as a managed service, although only a few telecom service providers have focused in on the trend so far.

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The emergence of private and public cloud computing technologies is causing organizations to revisit their IT performance management strategies and evaluate if the solutions that they currently have in place can be as effective in these new environments.

Many of them are already finding that the tools in which they had in place for many years do not have all of the necessary capabilities to support cloud deployments, and are looking for new features, delivery methods and pricing models to meet their new objectives. On the other hand, vendors from different areas of IT performance management are focusing a major part of their product development efforts on making their solutions more “cloud friendly”. When it comes to Business Service Management, some vendors might find that some capabilities that have been developed in the past might come in handy when managing private cloud environments.

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As cloud computing services are getting more traction in the enterprise, they are changing not only how organizations host their computing resources, but also how they go about managing the delivery of their IT services. One area of IT management that could be significantly impacted by deployments of public cloud services is monitoring the quality of end-user experience for business critical applications.

End-user monitoring solutions already provide numerous benefits for organizations, and it is expected that the value of these technologies will further increase as organizations adopt cloud computing services. For example, end-user monitoring tools enable organizations to achieve a better understanding of the value they are getting from deploying cloud services, as it allows them to compare the performance and usage of applications before and after they are moved to the cloud. Additionally, many end-user monitoring solutions are able to measure, not only availability and response times of applications, but also application usage for each user or user group.

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Using network virtualization to allocate WAN bandwidth

One key way WAN managers can apply network virtualization technologies is to create multiple virtual network "channels" on the same physical network. Many IT organizations are concerned not only with whether they are allocating enough bandwidth to each of their business-critical applications but with how applications on the same physical networks are affecting one another. Creating virtual channels and assigning each of these channels to individual applications enables organizations to ensure that each critical application can be seamlessly transferred across the network and ensure that new technology rollouts are not causing deterioration of existing business services.

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The adoption rates of different flavors of application performance management technologies across different industry sectors have been fairly uneven. Industries such as Retail, eCommerce, Telecommunications or Finance / Banking have been traditionally leading the pack in terms of the interest in this technology area, simply because there is more risk for them to lose money if their applications are performing poorly. However, recently we have been seeing IT and business executives from Healthcare being more active when it comes to understanding the value of technologies for monitoring application performance, especially solutions for end-user experience monitoring.

Not only is healthcare becoming one of the fastest growing areas of the application performance monitoring market, it is also pushing technology vendors to provide more advanced capabilities, due to requirements in this sector. There are a couple of reasons for this:

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- One CFO's Problem is Another CFO's Solution -

One of the top reasons organizations are becoming more interested in public cloud computing services is the flexibility of aligning the cost of IT computing resources with changes in business demand. Back in January, I published an article that discussed how organizations would be very interested in having a somewhat similar model for deploying IT management tools, but not many technology vendors are willing to offer this type of capability for delivering their products.

A recent article from TRAC Research discusses that the quality of end-user experience for delivery of IT services is not a single metric, but a set of measurements that help end-user organizations understand how business users are interacting with applications, how these applications are truly performing from the perspective of business users and what the impact of application performance on business goals is. Technologies for monitoring the quality of end-user experience are becoming more important to end-users, but there is still some confusion in the market about where these solutions fit, in regards to other IT management solutions.

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A number of products in the market include the term “end-user monitoring” in their positioning. However, some of these products are significantly different in terms of the metrics that are able to capture the quality of end-user experience for enterprise applications. In terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), there are four groups of measurements that these products can track:

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As server virtualization is becoming one of the fastest growing IT initiatives in the enterprise, organizations are looking to extend the benefits from these projects to new areas. As a result, they are looking to virtualize not only their servers and storage, but also to achieve similar benefits from virtualizing their desktops. For end-users, this means that their operation systems and software that used to be installed on their desktops are now being hosted in the datacenter and accessed across the network.

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End-user organizations are looking to take more of a service-centric approach when managing IT performance, and management vendors, for the most part, have done a good job of adjusting to this trend. Recently, I had the chance to see a number of demos of IT performance monitoring products that are based on different underlining technologies for collecting performance data, are being sold to different job roles within the organization, and even competing in different markets, but they all had something in common. The first screen of their performance dashboards looks almost identical. And products that are based on network monitoring technologies, data center management or application monitoring all of a sudden have the same look and feel:

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