“If an end user perceives bad performance from your website, her next click will likely be on your-competition.com.”- Ian Molyneux
There are more than 1 billion smartphone users across the globe. More than 179 billion mobile applications are downloaded per year. Application complexity and design, butterfly effect, network, web browser, configuration changes, peak usage, lack of proactive monitoring and others affect the performance of any mobile application. Without hassle free application usability, customers can’t stick to an application for long. Therefore, application performance plays a pivotal role in deciding the fate of any application.
Application performance management thus comes as a great help for the industry in order to reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), which ultimately resolves application performance issues in a quicker and efficient manner. Plenty of techniques uses across the globe to improve application performance, some notable are listed here.
Techniques that are Beneficial for Performance Improvement
Application Dependency Mapping (ADM): System outage results in unavailability of key business application. This not only diminished user productivity but also result into financial loss. Complexity of IT environment, ever changing infrastructure systems and inter-dependency of application makes application dependency very difficult. For a smooth functioning of business, it is important rather critical to maintain an accurate and complete Application Dependency Mapping (ADM); without one you are leaving your business vulnerable to suffering from potential serious consequences. In near future, Application Dependency Mapping will bring more visibility on how external application resources are being consumed, specially focusing on impact on application. Moreover, it will create relationships between interdependent applications and show how different applications are accessed, how they communicate with each other and how they are performing.
Data Blending and Visualization: By combining data from multiple sources into a functioning data set, data blending process provides better context to application monitoring which is very critical for maintaining application performance. Visualization tools are also improving application performance. Productivity increases when you can drill down into data, adjust times to contextualize cycles of activity and understand what really your users are doing in an easily interpreted presentation.
Crowdsourcing Techniques: Increased usage of crowdsourcing techniques has shown a dramatic improvement into common application problems and better end result for application user. Recently, one renowned firm had used crowdsourcing to solve a complex problem which their engineers were facing regarding data compression and huge files generation during a machine parts project. The firm used its crowdsourcing platform Fuse to ask the public for a solution to their problem. In few weeks, 40 viable entries were identified which had a good solution to the problem that the company had asked to the public. By leveraging on the power of crowdsourcing, organizations can expedite what used to be long involved processes.
Other Ways Apart from above Techniques to Improve Application Performance
Holistic view on the Entire Application Stack is vital: Multiple types of applications get used in almost every SME simultaneously. Software, middleware, extended infrastructure and especially the database and more work altogether not in isolation. Therefore, the days of discrete monitoring are over. In current times, organizations must have visibility across the entire application stack to diagnose real performance bottlenecks and improve end-user experience.
Analyzing past data for future prediction: Slow application performance creates unhappy users. Because the database plays most vital part in application performance, when there’s a performance issue, there is a good chance that the database is somehow involved. Moreover, database performance is dynamic, so it is not easy to compare abnormal performance with expected performance. Therefore, by analyzing past data that give brief insights regarding how applications performed at the same time on the same day last week, and the week before that, it will be easier to identify a problem way before it knocks the door and will be easier to find its root cause. Fixing it on time will lead towards smooth functionality of the application.
Market Prediction
Due to APM’s vast business applicability, its market is estimated to grow exponentially in the coming times and is set to become a $5 billion industry by 2019. The prime reason considered behind this estimated burgeoning growth is its capability to let administrators quickly discover, isolate and solve problems that negatively impact application performance.
Moreover, API enhances end user experience by using metrics-based monitoring and transaction tracing to calculate and increase application productivity. Due to the rapid evolution of industry, users are very much dependent on APM solutions but can’t find a one-size-fits-all approach. There is a dire necessity for an effective performance monitoring tool. Whether it is a hybrid approach or a traditional one, APM should be tailored to cater towards the unique needs of any single organization. There are many vendors who provide effective APM solutions, Cisco, IBM, HP and Microsoft are among them.
