The Impact of Application Performance
and Availability on Your Business—
and Your Customers
An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper
Prepared for CA Technologies
November 2012
IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
The Impact of Application Performance and Availability
on Your Business—and Your Customers
Table of Contents
Overview: The Challenges of Application Support............................................................................ 1
The Impact of Application Performance on Business and IT............................................................. 2
APM and Its Role in the IT Enterprise.............................................................................................. 3
Summary........................................................................................................................................... 5
©2012 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com
The Impact of Application Performance and Availability
on Your Business—and Your Customers
Overview: The Challenges of Application Support
“Supporting these applications requires skills we don’t have.”
“Our applications are unstable.”
“We had ten people on a 32-hour conference call.”
“We can’t get less than 30-second response time.”
These quotes are from IT executives and practitioners across a variety of industry verticals.
Their applications run the gamut of technologies and include applications running over virtual
desktops, Web applications, Cloud-based applications, and tiered, client-server applications –
and some are running “all of the above.” The complexity of today’s application environments
would have been unimaginable ten years ago, yet these applications are the backbone of every
business.
Without Customer Relationship Management (CRM), sales cycles become chaotic. Without
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the CFO can’t manage and report revenue. Without
Manufacturing and Distribution systems, companies can’t manufacture and deliver products
to customers. In short, without applications the business comes to a halt; however, all too
often application issues are impacting the business. Application performance and availability
problems disrupt day-to-day operations and diminish customer satisfaction, employee
productivity and brand equity.
Today’s IT organizations are discovering that managing modern,
Today’s IT organizations
complex applications is an expensive, time-consuming and
are discovering that
often frustrating proposition. IT teams are confronted with
managing modern, complex
competing requirements and priorities that are driving a number
applications is an expensive,
of paradoxical challenges. On the one hand, they must be experts
time-consuming and often
with the deep skills necessary to support complex technology. On
frustrating proposition.
the other, they are expected to “break down silos” and become
“more business savvy.” On the one hand, they are drilled with
the importance of pre-deployment testing. On the other, they are always under the gun
to deliver new technologies and applications faster and more efficiently. On the one hand,
the applications they support are too critical to fail. On the other, those applications are so
complex to deploy and manage that the risk of failure escalates with every code modification,
server replacement or network tweak.
In short, IT executives and practitioners all too often find themselves in a “no win” situation.
When applications perform as expected, customers don’t notice. The expectation is for
100% uptime, performance in the single digit seconds and near-immediate remediation of
unavoidable problems such as hardware failures. It is when customer expectations aren’t met
that IT is on the front lines.
All of these factors are driving industry awareness of Application Performance Management
(APM).
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Page 1
The Impact of Application Performance and Availability
on Your Business—and Your Customers
The Impact of Application Performance on Business and IT
The most recent ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) research finds
that for 25% of companies surveyed, an hour of downtime costs the business between $100,000
and $500,000. Another 29% report the cost of downtime to
be between $75,000 and $100,000. One technology company
Application performance
estimated its cost “per downtime incident” at between $750,000
has gone beyond being
and $1,500,000, and was experiencing between ten and fifteen
a quality issue—it has
of these “incidents” per year. Clearly, application performance
become a revenuehas gone beyond being a quality issue—it has become a revenueimpacting
issue as well.
impacting issue as well.
The research on the consumer impact of poor website performance
problems is compelling as well. Eighty percent of Web users will abandon a site if performance
is poor and 90% of them will hesitate to return to that site in the future. What is the
definition of “poor performance?” On average, online shoppers expect response time to be
less than five seconds.
Figure 1 reveals the true impact of these consumer statistics. The most frequent way that IT
finds out about an application-related problem (43% of the time) is STILL by phone calls
from employees. Notifications from application management tools are the next most frequent
way (25%), a percentage that is limited largely because the majority of IT organizations still
do not have access to such tools. Only 12% of performance complaints come from customers.
In other words, the vast majority of Web shoppers will not let a company know when Web
performance is poor—they simply buy from another company.
What is the typical way that IT finds out about application-related issues?
Select the most frequent way.
43%
Calls from employee users
25%
Application or transaction management tools
13%
Calls from line of business stakeholders
12%
Customer complaints
Silo tools
7%
Figure 1: User calls still most common way IT is notified regarding application problems
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Page 2
The Impact of Application Performance and Availability
on Your Business—and Your Customers
The net impact on IT is quite simple. The more directly an application correlates to revenue, the
more visible performance and availability of that application become. When critical applications
fail, CIOs get calls from other C-level executives. IT practitioners miss anniversaries and soccer
games because they are working late. Businesses miss revenue targets. In other words, bad
things happen, and too many IT organizations lack the tools they need to mitigate the business
and personnel impact of poor application performance.
APM and Its Role in the IT Enterprise
“Integrated applications” are a good example of the “complexity” characteristic of modern
applications. EMA research reveals that these are the most common type of application
being run in the enterprise. This statistic is particularly compelling because the other possible
selection options included popular applications run by almost every company—ERP, BI,
custom applications and customer-facing applications. IT professionals tell us, “Everything is
connected to everything.”
Why is this important? Figure 2 tells the story. Integrated applications are network-dependent,
run across multiple tiers, access integration middleware, and are significantly more fragile
than “stand alone” applications. The statistics show that almost 50% of companies report
performance issues of some kind with such applications, and only 12% are free of such issues.
Which of the following scaling/performance challenges related to
integrated applications is your organization currently experiencing?
49%
Poor application performance
System can’t scale to anticipated application
performance requirements
46%
Performance problems with applications but cannot
pinpoint the source
45%
Application availability interruptions due to our
current integration system
None of the above
40%
12%
Figure 2: Performance issues common in modern integrated applications
While the term “application complexity” is overused, it does describe this state of affairs
quite accurately. Transactions can traverse multiple applications, heterogeneous platforms
and software, and literally thousands of “hops.” This level of complexity means that a large
percentage of today’s applications can’t be effectively managed with manpower alone.
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Page 3
The Impact of Application Performance and Availability
on Your Business—and Your Customers
The manual application support practices of the past are being
The manual application
supplanted by application management solutions, an evolution by
support practices of
necessity. Silo tools are fine for infrastructure-specific monitoring
the past are being
and management. However, such tools focus on individual
supplanted by application
technology elements and lack visibility to the connective tissue
management solutions, an
underlying complex integrated applications. Messaging systems,
evolution by necessity.
mainframe tiers, data exchanges, database access, network
bandwidth, Web servers, and load balancers all contribute to
application execution and performance. IT specialists, no matter how intelligent, simply
cannot aggregate and correlate the massive amounts of information generated by all of these
sources into an accurate measurement of application performance.
APM tools bridge this gap and have multiple advantages over traditional, personnel intensive
management processes. They include:
• Application visibility: While silo tools provide information about the hardware and software
elements underlying the application, APM tools deliver holistic quantifications of application
execution performance ACROSS silos. There are a wide variety of APM tools (see below), and each
gathers performance from a slightly different perspective. The common thread is that they supply a
cross-platform view of application execution, versus disconnected views of technology silos.
• Application support expertise: APM solutions are created by world-class experts who understand the
myriad factors that contribute to and impact application performance. From this perspective, they
supplement the skills of in-house personnel and enable companies to manage applications without
“world-class” levels of expertise.
• Speed: Just as an ERP system posts payments far faster than a human bookkeeper does, APM
solutions monitor and correlate thousands of metrics every second. “Self learning” APM systems
“observe” the application and its environment and “learn” normal execution characteristics. They
can then observe and understand tiny changes in the context of the application ecosystem and
extrapolate a developing problem. Such capabilities assist IT to become more proactive, eventually
solving most problems BEFORE they actually impact users.
• Accuracy: Many IT organizations think they understand the application execution environment
because they manually maintain “maps” of application services electronically or on whiteboards.
Others maintain service models via tribal knowledge, change management processes, or
Configuration Management Systems (CMSs). However, history has demonstrated the fact that
such models are almost invariably wrong, particularly in highly volatile virtualized or integrated
environments.
APM solutions maintain internal service models that become part of problem triage and resolution.
This speeds mean time to recovery because it reduces the problem set, helping to eliminate
drawn-out “war room” exercises, overtime and staff burnout. Some leading APM vendors also
offer Application Discover and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) solutions, which automate the
process of “discovering” applications, tiers and interdependencies. Such products provide detailed
information about application components and configurations, and are a basis for linking end-user
transactions to failing components. They may also share data with CMSs to ensure accuracy.
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Page 4
The Impact of Application Performance and Availability
on Your Business—and Your Customers
• Simplicity: Modern applications are inherently complex, and APM solutions simplify managing
and reporting. Providing IT- and business-friendly information about complex applications is a key
value-add that APM customers appreciate.
• Business relevance: IT organizations are under pressure to be business relevant. Since applications are
the “product” delivered by IT, the ability to prioritize problems based on business impact ensures
that IT priorities and support activities are congruent with the needs of the business and end users.
Summary
The “APM” acronym has been adapted to address a wide variety of product types. What they all
have in common is the ability to deliver a level of end-to-end application/transaction visibility
that is beyond the capabilities of traditional silo tools. They differ in the way they do this, and
the most common categories of APM products include the following:
• Synthetic transactions: Recorded scripts are run against a “live” or test application to assess overall
performance.
• Endpoint monitoring: Agents with visibility into user actions and device performance are installed on
desktops or mobile devices. They monitor activities on the endpoint and transaction performance
from the endpoint back to the data center.
• Network flow analysis: These products typically sit on a network tap or span port and gather
application-related information from network packets and flows. They are particularly useful for
monitoring external services such as public Cloud, which cannot be directly instrumented by the
customer.
• Code-level analysis: This class of tools delivers code-level visibility. They are used for “deep dive”
analysis of performance problems down to the specific line of code or SQL call that is causing the
problem.
• JavaScript injection: Deployed on the Web server, an agent monitors interchanges between the
Web server and the endpoint device, often by downloading a snippet of code to the browser. They
provide a lightweight methodology for gathering APM data without installing an agent at the
endpoint.
• Cross-platform APM analytics: Leading-edge vendors are also introducing analytics-driven APM
solutions that assimilate and correlate data from a wide variety of sources. Used for end-to-end
monitoring and analysis of cross-tier performance, there are multiple products in this category. The
end goals of this class of products are twofold: to normalize and simplify performance data across
hybrid environments AND to provide a “single source of truth” about application behavior and
impact on business services.
In summary, managing today’s complex distributed applications is a high-risk activity that, for
many IT organizations, is consuming an inordinate amount of IT budget and resources. APM
solutions mitigate risk and reduce the manpower required to manage modern applications.
There is no one type of APM solution that addresses every type of application and every
potential performance problem. However, armed with the right knowledge, the informed
buyer can select the APM solution best suited to a particular company’s applications and
performance requirements.
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Page 5
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