8 ROI Benefits of APM (Continued, Part 2)

There’s no doubt that APM is an essential part of the IT toolbox. By detecting and diagnosing complex infrastructure issues and translating metrics into valuable insights, APM solutions improve MTTR, inform product development and customer service, and bolster the bottom line. In part 1, we identified eight ROI benefits of APM:

1. Increasing Developer Productivity
2. Reducing Downtime, Improving Business Continuity
3. Delivering Performance as a Feature
4. Preventing Application Problems
5. Reducing Infrastructure and Hosting Costs
6. Meeting SLA Requirements
7. Discovering and Resolving Issues Faster with AI and Analytics
8. Unwavering Focus on Your Applications

We highlighted the first few financial and non-financial benefits APM delivers for ROI last week, and today, we’ll highlight benefits 4-6.

4. Preventing Application Problems

The challenge is to discover application problems during development or QA in order to limit time and costs associated with fixing them. According to the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM (emphasis my own), “the cost to fix an error found after product release was four to five times as much as one uncovered during design, and up to 100 times more than one identified in the maintenance phase.”  In addition to added costs, catching errors late multiplies issues since bugs can have a cascading effect, overwhelming support teams and damaging reputations.

Pepperdata automatically tunes repetitive applications for resource efficiency and continues to make improvements on an ongoing basis to improve runtime. With real-time data from applications and cluster resources, developers can make accurate decisions about application configuration to prevent problems and improve performance.

5. Reducing Infrastructure and Hosting Costs

IT organizations today are tasked with managing growth and costs carefully, optimizing existing resources and buying only when needed. Developers and operators must align to reduce costs through optimization.

Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer leverages active resource management features in Hadoop to dynamically tune cluster resources and eliminate inefficiencies.

With Capacity Optimizer, travel services leaderExpedia increases capacity utilization by 30-50 percent without adding hardware, saving thousands of dollars and increasing cluster productivity.

6. Meeting Service Level Agreement (SLA) Requirements

SLA breaches can negatively impact sales, support, reputation and renewals. Critical operational environments that have near-zero tolerance for downtime, like healthcare, understandably have aggressive SLAs, and there are serious penalties if they’re breached Platform Spotlight enables operators to manage and troubleshoot performance issues to ensure these stringent SLA requirements are achieved.

To overcome performance issues and the risk of breached SLA related to processing over three billion medical records daily, Philips Wellcentive deployed Pepperdata Platform Spotlight and Capacity Optimizer to automatically improve capacity utilization. The result was increased throughput, which meant jobs completed on time and SLAs were met.

With benefits for both application development and infrastructure teams, Pepperdata provides organizations with an integrated “single-pane-of-glass” that correlates application and infrastructure performance and delivers operational efficiencies that multiple, disparate tools cannot.

In the final part of this blog series, we’ll cover the last two of the eight benefits mentioned earlier.