Managing what matters is what counts

By John Van der Meer

It's human nature to blame the next person, process or department when things go wrong and it's no different in the world of ICT, where often the fingers point directly at IT when an application fails.

"Depending on the size of the organisation, IT will put the blame on the network department where the administrator will go to great pains using the network management tools to monitor the infrastructure in an effort to prove that it's not the network causing the hiccup, but that the problem lies with the server," says Richard Hepplestone, application performance management consultant at Compuware SA,

"The blame is then escalated to the server people who pass the buck to the database administrator and so forth and so on. So, instead of focusing on fixing the problem, departments blame each other, taking a lot longer to solve the issue at hand," says Hepplestone.

The answer, says Hepplestone, lies in utilising the effective management tools that are available to manage not just the network and the server, but also the application. After all without the application what value can the network and server bring to the organisation?

"Top end application monitoring tools such as Vantage can manage the IT infrastructure as a whole, providing robust end-user monitoring and application performance analysis.

"By continuously monitoring application performance and availability on a 24x7 basis, end-user monitoring integrated with end-to-end application performance analysis, enables IT managers to proactively identify the cause of application performance problems and rapidly resolve them to meet service-level agreements (SLAs), and put an end to blame shifting" notes Hepplestone.

By managing applications at the business, transaction and infrastructure level, top end application management solutions provide the critical insight needed to improve application service and maximise the value of application and infrastructure investments.