What is the value of APM monitoring from a business perspective?

There are a few major areas where APM monitoring can be important from a business perspective.

1) We try to use the APM tools to not only measure the performance of the applications but of the key transaction that use the applications.  We then create very business specific service level objectives which go wells beyond availability to include things like performance, currency, accuracy, etc.  This way, when something goes wrong we always can express it in business terms and the criteria for what constitutes going wrong is defined by the business.

2) We can also tie business value to specific instances of the transaction.  This enables us to understand the business value behind failure and to covert things like slow performance to dollars.  We can report this, make priority decision about it or even in real time prioritize certain transactions to ensure the best experience to the most valuable transactions.

3) We have also found that often our APM solution is the first to recognize a business event.  For example we had a distribution center go off line.  We could immediately see the drop in transactions since we looked for an expected transaction stream from the center and an proactive alert when out before a manual one did.  We also can see the impact of marketing campaigns and other things.

4) The transaction view also helps with impact assessment in that if an IT service goes down, we can immediate see all of the impacted transaction and can proactively do something about it or if we can't we can notify the appropriate stakeholders much more quickly.

5) We utilize the data stream from our APM solutions to proactively monitor the environment and utilize self-healing solutions to prevent customer impact.  For example, can scale up/down, bounce a server, adjust record locking, throttle low value transactions, etc. to prevent business impact. 

APM monitoring is a critical tool for businesses to ensure the performance of their applications and infrastructure. By tracking key performance indicators, businesses can identify issues early and prevent them from becoming major problems. Additionally, APM data can be used to improve application design and optimize processes. In short, APM monitoring provides valuable insight to help businesses run more efficiently and effectively.

APM data is also valuable for troubleshooting purposes. By understanding how an application is performing, businesses can pinpoint where problems are occurring and take steps to fix them. This can save businesses a considerable amount of time and money in the long run.