Within today's fast paced business landscape, even a blink of an eye can be too long for end users to wait for an application to load. In order for businesses to run properly, their critical applications and services must run at top performance from the data center to end users over converged Internet protocol networks. Because these applications serve as the foundation of a company's daily tasks and initiatives, it's essential to ensure that they are functioning as required, so they meet the users' demands. In order to do this, businesses must have visibility into the degree and makeup of the IP traffic traveling within their networks.
Adding to this challenge is the complexity associated with global corporations. As software programs usually are critical for day to day business operations, enterprises must find search for ways to competently monitor and ensure the beginning-to-end application performance management of the wide area network (WAN) for companies with headquarters which span the globe. It is no longer a local challenge but one that must be managed on a global basis.
Monitoring network performance, while incredibly important, is simply not enough on its own to handle this issue. Service providers and enterprises must give full attention to building up "application awareness" into their service offerings and network performance management practices. This includes visibility into service utilization down to the application or end user stage, an understanding associated with quality from the end user experience perspective, and strong insight into the interdependencies and traffic between application components in today's complex, multi-tiered and virtualized data centers.
In order to adequately address the challenges associated with application performance and ensure business applications are running smoothly, enterprises and service providers need solutions that provide answers to the "who, what, where, when" traffic flow questions. Application performance management solutions enable them to help them to meet businesses' demands pertaining to program visibility, application usage management, application response management, application performance monitoring, and application performance optimization and reporting services. With these solutions in place, enterprises and service providers are properly equipped to guarantee that applications can operate efficiently and be delivered as end users expect and demand.
For enterprises and service providers alike, it is not enough to simply deliver traditional IP-VPN and Ethernet connectivity. Today's end users expect applications to run at top performance, and enterprise customers are looking for visibility to better understand the business programs as well as data traffic crossing their IP networks. It is more important than ever for businesses to effectively monitor and ensure end-to-end application performance with application performance management solutions.