To my utter amazement, while people in the system management business have been buzzing about APM for years, the acronym means practically anything but Application Performance Management in the “bible” of cool terms, Wikipedia. Perhaps while it is easy to understand the function of Advanced Power Management, or the Association of Project Management, or even Apm as a demon in the Enochian language, the scope of Application Performance Management is certainly not well-defined. In a sense, the demon that wreaks havoc on application performance is perhaps suppressed by good-enough development and deployment tools and process, server monitoring tools, and simple synthetic monitoring services acting as surrogate for real user monitoring. Until now, that is…
With SOA, Web services and SaaS becoming mainstream, the complexity of this dynamic computing environment where some or all of the application infrastructure components lie beyond the immediate control of IT, has rendered the methodologies and tools built for client-server computing no longer sufficient. That leads to the need for APM tools designed specifically for Web applications. Since there is no “formal” definition for the space, I would like to put forward a definition as a straw man definition from a practitioner (not analysts or theoretical) point of view.
Workflow and related IT tools deployed to detect, diagnose, remedy and report on application performance issues to ensure that application performance meets or exceeds end-users’ and businesses’ expectations.
Application performance relates to how fast transactions are completed on behalf of, or information is delivered to the end user by the application via a particular network, application and Web services infrastructure.
While most APM tools are designed for the client-server environments, the newer tools address the needs of dynamic Web applications including monitoring application performance experienced by end-users, business groups and Web services, and relate potential performance issues to points within or without the data center for speedy problem diagnostics and resolution.
What do you think? If you have an opinion, contribute to the APM page that I created on the Wikipedia (now that's CGM--CEO generated media--at work!).
APM, Application Performance Management
