Pavel Minarik, Vice President of Technology, Progress, outlines what organizations should prioritise to deliver apps that meet the highest standards.
Applications are truly running today’s digital world. But even though we use apps every day it is difficult to wrap our heads around just how much they have changed the way we live and interact with each other and with brands, both as consumers and professionals.
Only when you look at the impatience of the average consumer when an application is not working or simply lagging and you’ll understand how critical apps have become for most people.
If an e-commerce application, for instance, is taking an unreasonable amount of time to load – or isn’t loading at all – customers likely won’t wait around for the retailer’s technology to get its act together.
This is even more prevalent in the Asia Pacific region which is one of the world’s biggest mobile-first markets – with smartphone adoption in Asia set to reach over 90% by 2030, mobile apps and what are now called “super-apps” will play an increasingly important role in feeding users’ demand for new services, convenience as well as connecting remote populations to essential services.
So, what should organizations prioritise when looking at delivering apps that meet the highest standards?
Don’t underestimate the importance of the network
Applications are made up of a variety of components but the network one thing links them all and plays a determining role in a successful application experience (AX) and user experience (UX).
Where the network goes wrong, it can drive much bigger consequences than a simple app malfunctioning.
In recent months, the APAC region has experienced many network issues, including full outages, that have greatly impacted organizations and their consumers.
A routing error in the network of Cloudflare, one of the largest content delivery network services, caused a massive website outage in Pakistan and other countries in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, leading to a slower browsing experience for users.
Earlier, Microsoft was hit with a networking outage that took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook, affecting services across Asia Pacific.
The consequences of network issues, including loss of productivity, cannot be understated.
How can NPM help businesses?
Understanding how fast apps are running, any existing pain points and how to mitigate these are essential to ensure that apps are providing an optimum user experience. This can be achieved through implementing an Application-Aware Network Performance Monitoring (AA-NPM) tool or Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) for short as a key component of the network management.
NPM solutions work on the network level with application layer visibility. They detect application traffic and measure the transport time of a request from user to application. It can also track application delay, and response time from the application server to the request.
Should an application error arise, NPM solutions empower IT and network teams with error details such as the error code, its timing, user identification and further information about the transaction. IT can then troubleshoot the transaction and the issue can be resolved and application performance restored.
Suppose users have reported experiencing slow network speeds with websites taking an excessively long time to load. Additionally, remote users are unable to connect to local systems. NPM allows the administrator to promptly verify Internet bandwidth utilization by comparing the volume of data transfers to the available capacity.
Prompted by slow connectivity in their network that was limiting some users’ activity, a company’s IT team found out that large amounts of data for a Windows update were downloaded from an external source instead of using a local WSUS server.
Thanks to the NPM in place, the mean time to resolve (MTTR) was reduced from an average of 20-60 minutes to 10 minutes as the administrator was able to quickly find the devices responsible for the downloads and reconfigure them with three clicks. With the average outage costing $4,500 per minute (for a 2,500-5,000-employee company), this meant savings of $225,000 for the company.
Best practice for app-driven industries
There are many application-driven companies and industries across APAC that could particularly benefit from better network monitoring to support their user experience but also avoid critical incidents that could have much bigger repercussions.
Whether it’s retail, financial services, healthcare or even government services, here are some tips to set-up a successful app and network monitoring strategy:
- Prioritise apps to monitor
It might not be possible to monitor the performance of all organization’s apps, especially for app-reliant companies. It is thus important to prioritise the key applications that should be monitored by looking at the most critical response time. For example, an accounting system may seem critical, but its performance is not as crucial as a customer-facing eCommerce application.
- Integration
- An application aware network performance monitoring tool must be considered an integral part of the organization’s IT monitoring, management and surveillance ecosystem.
- Automation
Look for ways to automate the collection of data, reporting and even automate responses to common IT issues, such as restarting a frozen server. For applications, there can be automated responses to performance problems or to deal with traffic spikes.
- Minimize alerts
Avoid flooding IT with alert overload by informing the appropriate person for an issue that needs attention.
- Tailored reporting
With the right solution, reports can be tailored according to the recipient’s role. This means that the IT staffers can pull dedicated activity reports, with high-level reports generated for the management team. With reports integrated into forecasting tools, IT pros can more easily predict an application’s future performance.
Organizations that have clear visibility into their network and applications thanks to an AA-NPM tool can much more quickly identify the root cause of a disruption and take care of the problem and thus ensure the optimal performance of applications and the overall user experience – while saving a significant amount of money and preventing reputational damage.
Click below to share this article