Gartner Research

Use Monitoring for SaaS Despite Its Limitations

Published: 06 September 2019

Summary

SaaS obscures its underlying infrastructure from IT, making traditional performance monitoring less effective. However, when mission-critical applications run on SaaS, zero visibility is unacceptable. How should application technical professionals use SaaS monitoring tools to drive to a resolution?

Included in Full Research

  • What Your Stance on SaaS Monitoring Should Be
  • How SaaS Monitoring Works
  • Why You Should Monitor SaaS, Even Though You Don’t Control the Application or Infrastructure
  • Strengths
    • Quickly Pinpoints Where Performance Bottlenecks Are and Who They Impact
    • Provides Concrete Data for Interacting With SaaS Vendors or Third Parties
    • Identifies Locale-, Geo-, Site- or Service-Specific Issues
  • Weaknesses
    • SaaS Monitoring Offers Limited Visibility
    • Disparate SaaS Coverage Exacerbates Tool Sprawl
    • SaaS Monitoring Overwhelms IT With Data Instead of Recommending Actions
  • Choose a SaaS Monitoring Product by Following Gartner’s High-Level Framework
    • Inventory SaaS Portfolio
    • Identify Monitoring Criteria
    • Evaluate Best of Breed vs. Integrated
  • Establish Functional Requirements for Your SaaS Monitoring Product
    • Geographic Coverage
    • Active Monitoring
    • Outage Tracking
    • API Extensibility
    • Synthetic Transactions
    • Network Transport and Service Endpoint Monitoring
    • Baseline Generation and Tracking
    • SaaS Product Coverage
    • Real User Monitoring
    • Endpoint Monitoring
    • Network Provider Path Monitoring
  • Merge SaaS Monitoring and SaaS Management to Bolster Your Business Case
    • SLA Monitoring
    • License Utilization
    • Chargeback Modeling

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