Over the last two years, technology vendors have been moving away from using the term "network monitoring" and replacing it with "application performance management."
The main reason is that the performance of corporate networks is increasingly measured by the performance of the applications delivered over those networks.
As a result, businesses are replacing familiar network-specific metrics, such as network uptime and time to troubleshoot network performance issues, with metrics like application availability and quality of experience as key performance indicators on their networks.
These changes are forcing vendors to enhance their product portfolios and provide more capabilities for monitoring the performance of networked applications in terms of measuring how fast information is delivered to end users via the network, the application itself or the Web services infrastructure, and pointing to possible problems.
New opportunities are also being created in the emerging applications performance management (APM) market, including providing it as a managed service, although only a few telecom service providers have focused in on the trend so far.
Here's why it's important. Organizations that responded to a recent TRAC Research survey reported that they lose thousands of dollars when business-critical applications slow down, even for a few minutes.