Over the years I've worked with many NetIQ AppManager users and those researching it. They have varied environments of 200 to 10,000 servers and they all have their differences; but recently some IT challenges have seemed to bubble to the top of concerns that they want to address with AppManager: improving application performance, keeping pace with rapid IT changes, and determining the severity of user complaints.
1/ Improving Application Performance
First, most IT organizations have shifted their focus to finding ways to better manage the performance of their applications, since that is where the business is focused. Apps require specialized knowledge and monitoring vs. the focus on servers and network focus of years past. This is resulting in a resurgence of interest in the full array of AppManager modules, which provide built-in knowledge for popular applications, as well as AppManager Module Builder, which can be used to create a new module for any application on a windows system. That helps those users cover the monitoring needs of pretty much anything in their environment, which is the foundation for good application management. After all, what can't be measured, can't be managed.
2/ Keep Pace with Rapid IT Changes
A second area is keeping pace with the rapid changes that occur in most IT environments today. The pace of change has been accelerated by technologies like virtualization and monitoring is often an after-thought. That results in blind spots and unusable reports that cripple performance and capacity and problem management efforts. What AppManager user have at hand are advanced features like discovery, monitoring policies and management groups that are applied automatically to enable consistent monitoring, even when the environment changes faster than administrators can keep up with on their own.
3/ Determine Severity of User Complaints
The third problem area I hear a lot about is determining the severity of user complaints. In many cases, IT organizations haven't invested in measuring service performance from an end-user perspective against expectations, perceptions and standards. Without a way to measure that, when the end users start to call, and complain, IT doesn’t know if its legitimate or not. The IT organization can’t prioritize response to justifiable user needs, resulting in a negative impact on productivity. This has increased the interest in AppManager ResponseTime modules, which objectively measures the performance of IT services to objectively identify performance problems before users start complaining.
We've worked to help address these common problems with AppManager, but we're always interested in learning about your new challenges. We'd love to hear from you over in the AppManager HQ.
Posted
Feb 22 2012, 10:27 AM
by
Travis Greene