But few carriers offer service-level agreements (SLAs) around application response times. And while enterprises report that every minute of service downtime has a significant negative effect on their businesses, some telecom carriers are still offering SLAs with mean time to repair (MTTR) performance issues of 24 hours or more.
The combination of APM, network monitoring, quality of service (QoS) and WAN optimization tools would allow carriers to manage different aspects of application delivery.
They can define acceptable performance baselines and offer service-level guarantees for meeting these baselines. If performance issues are caused by applications themselves, application performance management tools can point that out, even though carriers are typically not responsible for these problems (some, however, are also offering services around application management).
MTTR guarantees can be used for both hardware and services, but they can also be used for network or application performance. For application performance, even a two-to-three hour SLA for MTTR is too much, never mind 24 hours.
Carriers shouldn't get rid of traditional MTTR, but they can add a set of metrics that go beyond uptime for effective application performance monitoring.
Telecom carriers are in a good position to take advantage of the market shift toward networked applications and build managed services that address the key pain points of end-user organizations. Service providers should realize, however, that taking advantage of this opportunity is not as simple as changing their offerings from managed network services to managed application performance management services and offering visibility into application performance.