The relevance of Application performance management tools to today’s application driven business

by Soniya Sharma Artical writer

Applications do far more than manage back-office tasks. Efficient and speedy are the key to modern business processes as today’s enterprises are more application-driven than ever, relying on apps for numerous tasks even down to automating and streamlining marketing, customer relations, etc. Application performance management tools, therefore, have become a necessity as the productivity of many facets of an organization is dependent on optimal application performance and directly affects business operations.

With the application landscape shifting to the cloud and the dramatically changing face of enterprise infrastructures, applications face numerous challenges today that may hamper its performance. These issues must be resolved to provide real performance benefits across systems. These very capabilities are more necessary than ever. Some Application performance management tools have risen to meet this challenge, with full-stack visibility complete with diagnostics and actionable recommendations based on sophisticated data analysis.

The role of testing center of excellence- A center of excellence generally refers to a team, shared facility or an organizational entity that concentrates on a focus area, a specialization. Such a center for testing, researches and experiments to find the best testing practices, maintains standardized test processes and focuses on optimizing the utilization of resources. It also devotes time to creating a bank of re-usable codes that are efficient and hence end up saving valuable time to the company. Most of the top-notch IT solution providing companies have a dedicated testing center of excellence which is what makes them the best in their field.

Functional and non-functional testing- It may at times be relevant to test a software application for its non-functional requirements. In non-functional testing the quality characteristics of the component or system is tested. Non-functional refers to aspects of the software that may not be related to a specific function or user action such as scalability or security. Consider the factor of how many people are able to log in and use the application at once. Non-functional testing is also performed at all levels like functional testing and is provided by some solution providers.

Moving forward with application performance management tools- Thorough testing at each stage alerts the development team of an impending problem at a very initial stage before it manifests and becomes a major concern. It also allows for rapid problem resolution. When these testing processes are completely automated they inadvertently free up an enterprise’s IT department to focus on other tasks that enhance revenue. Hence, Application performance management tools enable providing consistent optimal performance without spending hours going through infinite lines of code and other data to identify potential problems.