The best way to avoid application downtime troubles

In today’s always-connected world, applications do not go down quietly. Social media forums overflow with irate customers announcing disruptions, sometimes grabbing the attention of news websites. Even as your organization addresses the issues, you face reputational damage and loss in revenue that can extend long past the initial  incident and resolution.

To pour salt on the wound, down applications can mean losing users and customers. These days, users seem more likely to quickly switch to a competitor’s app instead of waiting out an outage. This means a single, unplanned application failure could not only cost your organization tens of thousands of dollars per minute, but also the loss of future potential sales or revenues. Customer loyalty shifts quickly.

So how do you simplify in a complex world?

The best way to reduce the potential impact of a problem is to avoid it in the first place by maintaining applications at peak performance. Easier said than done? Not necessarily. It all comes down to how well you can identify, isolate and diagnose potential issues.

Application performance management (APM) enables you to proactively monitor business applications to continuously deliver optimal availability and performance. Organizations that incorporate robust APM already have an edge when it comes to application availability. Designing APM solutions for a specific environment give organizations an even bigger advantage.

As applications and platforms continue to grow in complexity, the need for a complete APM strategy has become more crucial to help business applications run smoothly. At its most basic, a good APM solution should be able to:

• Identify performance issues early
• Isolate where the problem is occurring
• Diagnose the issue for quick problem resolution

The APM portfolio from IBM offers a premier monitoring solution to avoid the problems created by performance issues. One client’s experience: “IBM helped detect 100 percent of the major incidents that occurred, including silent failures, and helped us eliminate manual thresholds, which will result in a cost avoidance of $300,000 annually,” said Chris Smith, director at Consolidated Communications Holdings, Inc.

Another advantage:  IBM APM can unify and simplify monitoring for businesses already using a broad range of IBM solutions. If you are using any combination of IBM MQ, IBM Integration Bus, IBM WebSphere Application Server or IBM DataPower, IBM APM can provide efficiency over monitoring these environments separately. IBM designed its advanced monitoring tools alongside the development of IBM solutions to help organizations quickly identify, isolate and diagnose problems.

For more information on monitoring across complex systems and databases, download the application performance management whitepaper.