8 ROI Benefits of APM (Part 1)

Application performance management (APM) is an essential element of operations and business success. The goal of APM is to detect and diagnose complex issues and translate performance metrics into valuable insights in order to meet service levels by improving mean time to repair (MTTR), customer relations/service and business outcomes. It’s a mouthful but very important to understand.

When used to its full potential, APM provides both financial and non-financial benefits for a significant – and often glaringly obvious – return on investment (ROI). Financial benefits include cost reductions or revenue increases, while non-financial benefits include things like improved customer satisfaction, better stickiness, and shorter cycle time. Both financial and non-financial benefits must be taken into account to fully assess the value of any technology solution, and APM is no different.

There are numerous benefits of an effective APM solution, including:

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

Let’s look at a few of them in detail.

1. Increasing Developer Productivity

Developers usually have only a limited understanding of how new features or releases perform. In addition, all too frequently, bottlenecks occur during development and testing, which cripples infrastructure performance. It’s important that expensive and highly sought after software developers spend their time on innovation to grow the business, as opposed to solving difficult and complex performance problems..

With our extensive collection of real-time hardware and application metrics, Pepperdata Application Spotlight enables developers to quickly identify and resolve performance problems to maximize productivity. With Pepperdata, they can also create custom alerts to quickly identify potential issues and pinpoint the root cause of a problem, easily saving them a few hours a month and paying for itself very quickly.

2. Reducing Downtime, Improving Business Continuity

When a website is down, business is lost. Period. Internet users are finicky and impatient, and when faced with a 404 (Page Not Found) error, usually seek to buy elsewhere, including from your competition.  If a pizza delivery site goes down or responds slowly, there are countless options for ordering a pie. Compared to a $15 pie, consider the scale and impact on revenue for an airline, hotel chain, or travel site.

Proactive application monitoring with Pepperdata Platform Spotlight helps raise the flag on symptoms before they become problems, from finding sluggish queries to identifying high volume requests that should be optimized. Being able to quickly identify the root cause of a problem can drastically reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) for disabled online sites.

3. Delivering Performance as a Feature

Remember that performance is also an application feature, capable of driving higher sentiment for and stickiness to your product. While hard to quantify, performance is key to customer conversion and retention. Reduced cycle time means faster data processing and faster results for stakeholders. Ad targeting is a perfect example of an app that benefits from (and in fact, must have) high-performance software.

To ensure application performance, Pepperdata increases platform throughput up to 50% by leveraging AI-driven resource management to tune cluster resources and recapture wasted capacity. For example, Chartboost, which provides mobile game developers with an ad marketplace, was faced with explosive data growth in their cluster. By leveraging Capacity Optimizer, Chartboost significantly improved cluster throughput and performance and therefore lowered their total AWS spend by more than 30 percent.

The bottom line is that Pepperdata offers unified performance management solution that delivers benefits for both application development and infrastructure teams. With Pepperdata, organizations get an integrated “single-pane-of-glass” that correlates application and infrastructure performance and delivers operational efficiencies that multiple, disparate tools cannot.

In future blog posts, we’ll cover the other APM benefits mentioned above.

Learn more

• Learn more about Pepperdata Application Spotlight.
• Read the Chartboost case study.

Read the blog post, The Relentless Growth of Big Data and the Challenge to APM and Developers