Show Your Applications Some Love

As a consumer, we utilize applications on a daily basis. How many times have you found yourself asking, “There’s got to be an app for that?” It’s quite simply the expectation in today’s app-centric world. And when an app doesn’t function the way it’s supposed to? Well, no one has time for that, and we simply move on…

But with the increased demands of today’s consumer, the complexity of modern applications is also growing. Software can now be deployed on-prem, in the cloud or utilizing both in a hybrid model; however, the shift to using microservice architectures has led to highly-distributed, multi-tier applications that are made up of millions of lines of code, which in turn require multiple teams to develop and manage them. This in turn makes troubleshooting issues an often tedious and complex process, which then ultimately impacts the business bottom line when an app has performance issues or is completely offline.

So, how can a business give their applications the love and attention they deserve to ensure they’re up and running, meeting the demands of their customers? The first step is understanding why applications fail to start with.

Why Applications Fail

Applications fail for many numerous reasons, but here are some of the big ones:

• Human Error: The majority of application failures can be attributed to human error. These errors can be simple mistakes with big impact, such as rebooting the wrong database or systemic errors in the overarching architecture design. While this can be mitigated by using a test/dev environment before pushing to production, the human factor will always remain a factor to consider.
• Coding Mistakes: Untested libraries, frequent changes and poor exception handling (just to name a few) can wreak havoc on an application’s ability to function correctly.
• Not Enough Capacity: Just because an application worked in development and testing doesn’t mean it always will when it goes live and is put to the test by real users. And while testing an application against the expected load and beyond would be ideal, it doesn’t always happen, often due to time and budget constraints. So, it can be tricky knowing exactly what capacity will be needed.
• Hardware Failure: Sometimes it’s as simple as a hardware device crashes. And while this might seem simple to resolve, in more complex environments, it can be challenging to pinpoint in a timely manner.
• Network Issues: Beyond congestion, a bad switch port, incorrect configurations or even link failures can lead to network issues that affect the application performance or even access.

At the end of the day, there are multitudes of other reasons an application could fail, making it critical to embrace an application performance management (APM) strategy. And just like applications themselves have evolved, the meaning of what it means to monitor applications has evolved as well.

APM a Must in Today’s App-Driven World

In order to ensure that every critical swipe, tap and click are monitored and then correlated to business outcomes, it requires an end-to-end approach that ensures that every part of even the most complex environments—from software to infrastructure to business outcomes—is highly visible, optimized and driving the growth of the business.

At OneNeck, we’ve partnered with Cisco AppDynamics and can offer our customers an APM solution that tracks the behavior of components, such as physical hardware, virtual machines where applications reside, JVM executing the application environment, web containers, associated databases, caches, external web services and the code running the application itself.

In addition to the technical aspects of the application, it also provides detailed insight into the end-user experience, giving visibility into the quality of service you’re providing to your customers.

By monitoring applications and tracking customer behavior, AppDynamics APM can alert stakeholders of any issues related to key business transactions — like a broken checkout link that could impact revenue or a slow login page that’s hurting customer experience. The power of being alerted to application performance issues in real time allows business owners to fix the problem before it hurts the company’s bottom line.

So, is it time to show your apps some love and in turn, earn the love and devotion of your customers? Then let’s talk APM.

Additional Resources: