A single hour of downtime will cost Amazon over $100 million in lost sales, according to Business Insider’s article. While businesses will tend to vary regarding the losses that can spawn from one hour of IT downtime, these losses can cripple your business, not to mention lead to reduced customer satisfaction rates.
As such, application performance monitoring has a vital role to play in identifying application vulnerabilities and preventing them from leading to some form of downtime.
The faster you can react to the alerts from your application performance monitoring solution, the more effective it will be to prevent any downtime. As a result, working with a solution that can provide actionable intelligence is vital. A great solution should offer you diverse types of alerts to point out errors, performance deviations, warnings and bottlenecks in a context-aware manner.
Here is what you need to look for when searching for a solution with actionable alerts:
Content List
Root Cause Alerting
The identification of the root cause of application downtimes and slowdowns is one of the most difficult jobs for IT professionals, and yet it has a vital role in determining how fast the bottleneck can be eliminated. Nowadays, applications and infrastructures are interdependent and complex.
This means that when one infrastructure or application is affected by a problem, the ripple effect can be felt in other dependent applications.
For instance, your application might be experiencing problems due to issues in one of its databases. A great tool for app performance monitoring with custom metrics should allow you to determine the root issue from the onset. This reduces the time spent by IT professionals guessing the problem and ensures that they can come up with a solution before any downtime can affect the business.
Composite Alerting
C-suite executives will mostly be interested in the performance of the application, and alerts that make room for simplified versions will suffice. For instance, an executive leader might only be interested in the performance of the user experience. While there are various ways to describe user experience from application launch time to application refresh latency, executive leaders might not be interested in these metrics.
A composite alert will be a combination of multiple metrics to determine the performance of a specific aspect of the application. These simplified alerts can further help in the making of strategic decisions for the business.
Aggregated Alerting On Farm-Wide Metrics
In case your application has a large infrastructure, the chances are that you use multiple servers in a cluster or farm. Whenever multiple servers at the firm are faced with connection spikes, the admin will need to be alerted. This will help them take actionable steps to increase the number of servers to cater for the additional workload.
Additionally, more complex conditions need also to be addressed. For instance, admins might want to be alerted once a quarter of the servers are reporting an 80% CPU utilization rate. Such alerts help IT leaders to determine the health of their entire farm other than concentrating on a single server.
Situation-Aware Dynamic Baseline Alerts
Depending on the trends of app usage, there is a need to continually adjust alert thresholds for the various times of the day and week. However, managing the adjustment of these every metric manually is challenging and time-consuming. On the other hand, an admin will require different threshold alerts during peak app usage days and a different threshold during the weekend.
Baselining the infrastructure and application performance is one of the best ways to succeed in this quest. Unless there are situation-awareness capabilities embedded into your application performance monitoring solution, it is possible that admins will receive excess false positives. In most cases, it is wise to work with applications that leverage AI in baselining infrastructure to identify alert threshold.
Conclusion
The types of alerts you receive draw the line between eliminating application downtimes and barely surviving them. With the right alerts, necessary steps can be taken within the shortest time to prevent losses. Look for an application monitoring solution with superior alerting capabilities to be ahead of any looming threat.