IBM solutions measure the preproduction user experience with the same accuracy as measuring the production experience-a capability that previously has been too time-consuming, complex and expensive to achieve due to the limited lifespans of pre-production virtual machines.

The fast pace makes it impossible for developers to use time-consuming, top-down, operations-focused traditional approaches that rely on administrators to deploy and configure agents on application servers.Instead, the IBM approach adopts a bottom-up, developer focused approach that allows developers to directly embed monitoring technology into virtual machine images-and then continue to use these technologies as additional workloads are initiated, without deploying again.

Designed for use in the development of web-based applications for public and private clouds, the IBM solution provides quantitative information on factors such as the application's response time or the end user's wait time. Using these insights, developers are better able to ensure both a product that meets user needs and a process that helps reduce or avoid the significant expense of repairing applications after they are in production.

The path to effective application performance management should follow the needs of the organization implementing it. Begin with your organization's existing infrastructure and build at the pace that's right for you-there are no requirements to add all capabilities on day one. Then, as you progress, take advantage along the way of industry-leading IBM best practices.

By doing so, you can gain a better view of your transactions and vulnerabilities, build your reporting structure, customize your dashboards-and ultimately arrive at the end-to-end monitoring capabilities that deliver the best results.

Start simple:

1. Assess your current capabilities; many organizations begin with low or even no visibility, forcing them into management that is reactive, ad hoc and slow to provide repairs.

2. A basic goal is to make sure you have in place the capabilities to assure that you can meet your service level agreements.

Increase visibility:

3. Implementing agentless solutions provides a low-touch approach to discovering and viewing your infrastructure topology and to isolating problems.

4. Adding solutions that utilize application agents can improve the accuracy of diagnostics with increased visibility into the key performance indicators of each infrastructure component.

Achieve true end-to-end monitoring:

5. Using advanced, robotic monitoring, you can provide early warning of performance problems-reducing or avoiding the impact of interruptions on users.

6. Implementing custom dashboards can enhance your insight into the status of key applications for individual lines of business.

7. Deploying agent-based tracking can help you find and remediate difficult-to-isolate, sporadic problems.

IBM solutions provide the complete path to effective application performance management. Meeting the full range of necessary capabilities-from discovery to predictive analytics-the IBM portfolio provides not only visibility, but also application control and automation to streamline IT management, meet end-user expectations for quality of service, and support business results.

The IBM portfolio for application monitoring and performance management helps organizations of all types optimize infrastructure performance and availability through the use of best practices for identifying and resolving problems in distributed and host environments. Capabilities are targeted at needs ranging from managing the cloud, to lowering hardware and software costs, to minimizing performance risks.

Together, IBM solutions provide industry-leading capabilities that enable IT to move beyond basic resource monitoring to meet the needs of today's smarter planet, where instrumented, interconnected and intelligent organizations deploy more virtualized applications and consume more information than ever before.

Comprehensive IBM solutions provide the full range of capabilities necessary to visualize, control and optimize the operationof mission-critical applications, including:

• Discovery: Providing visibility into application resources and their dependencies to speed problem resolution
• End-user experience monitoring: Tracking the user experience across diverse environments to support compliance with service level agreements
• Transaction tracking: Quickly identifying and isolating performance problems to create the necessary context and insight for anticipating which-and when-problems may occur
• Diagnostics: Facilitating diagnosis and repair with a domain - specific operations tool
• Predictive analytics: Enabling proactive management to reduce outages and improve business performance with predictive analytics and capacity planning

"With SCM AI, IBM has stuck the perfect balance between immediate time to value and ease of use vs product depth and breadth. Within a half of hour we were able to install the product and detect problems in both our on-premise as well as AWS cloud based application environments." Nathan Owen, - Blue Medora

It took a grand total of 20 minutes to install the SCM AI server and have insights into our Virtual Machines running within our on-premise VMware infrastructure as well as our Amazon AWS based cloud based VMs." Nathan Owen, - Blue Medora