Both Application and Network Performance Management Solutions ensure superior performance and end-user experience - Vinay Sharma , regional Director , India and SAARC, NETSCOUT

Today’s business ecosystems increasingly rely on digital technologies and maintaining them across the cloud, remote work locations, and mobile devices can be a challenge.  Managing exponential traffic growth hitting critical internet circuits and VPN gateways, capacity, and bandwidth availability is not just an operational challenge but a business-critical priority. 

Businesses are today prioritizing the delivery of high-quality user experience for employees from anywhere, over any device for any infrastructure.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solutions, a subset of Application Performance Management monitor IT environments to determine if performance standards are being met.  With APM, IT teams can spot issues that could be causing slowdowns or degradations in the business services that impact customers, revenue, and corporate profitability.   Aimed with critical insights, the IT team is able to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).  Effective APM is able to measure application performance against business outcomes ensuring maximum value to the organization. 

Because of the complexity of today’s IT infrastructure, which involves numerous components and interdependencies, it is vital to have insights into how these network components perform individually and collectively. Service performance and end-user experience depend on everything working optimally.  Network Performance Management (NPM) Solutions assure that the network, a critical component of the overall service infrastructure is performing at its peak.  NPM ideally conducts real-time monitoring of networked packets from all applications traversing the enterprise network where the focus is on potential performance issues.

Although focused on different functionality, APM and NPM solutions are both critically important for monitoring business-impacting services throughout the distributed enterprise and ensuring superior performance and end-user experience. 

To be certain the performance and user experience are exceptional, APM tools monitor and measure performance metrics in real time, including the following strategic capabilities:

·       Application availability or uptime to validate whether applications like, those for voice, video, and business data are online and complying with service level agreements.

·       Error rates to establish whether performance is being degraded or outright failing.

·       Request rates to monitor application traffic, focusing specifically on spikes, inactivity, and the number of simultaneous users.

·       Response times to uncover whether response speeds are impacting application performance.

·       Number of instances, in the case of cloud-based applications, so the enterprise is aware of how many servers or apps are running. 

·       User experience to determine how satisfied the customer is with the performance of the application.  

NPM is similar to APM, but instead of focusing on applications, it assesses the performance metrics of each component of the network infrastructure. NPM ideally conducts real-time monitoring of networked packets from all applications traversing the enterprise network.

NPM tools mitigate performance problems by,

·       Looking for packet loss, conducting a network traffic analysis, uncovering network node outages, and measuring bandwidth usage.

·       Analyzing network traffic volumes, available bandwidth, throughput, and network error data to provide a comprehensive view of all layers of the network that can be used both for troubleshooting and for developing effective network management policies that proactively mitigate issues, improve productivity, and enhance the end-user experience.

·       Watching for security threats, including uncovering malware, identifying unsecured network devices and dramatic increases in traffic volumes, and revealing other network vulnerabilities. 

·       Employing closed-loop automation by leveraging intelligence to match various problems with potential recovery steps, which eliminates the need to physically monitor and collect data, analyze it, and then remediate problems—creating tremendous efficiencies and dramatically improving network performance.

Sharing data from both APM and NPM solutions can provide a holistic view for quicker troubleshooting and enhanced visibility. That is why a holistic approach to visibility should be an integral part of a broad-based performance and availability strategy that encompasses not only the edge and private data center but also cloud and SaaS environments.

The most suitable performance management platform should be able to monitor and analyze applications for KPIs related to responsiveness, errors, conversations, and service dependencies, rapidly pinpointing the source of disruptions and slowdowns to keep the business running smoothly.   It should also monitor incoming traffic for internet circuits and VPN gateways, helping to minimize disruptions and optimize performance.