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Factoring in “Hard to Monitor” Applications Within Your IT Monitoring Approach

I spoke to a Vendor recently and my contact there was talking about hard to monitor applications, you know the ones, the ones when you mention them to an APM Vendor they suddenly start to back off, say they’ll get back to you and then they go very quiet! Things like Citrix, SAP, legacy in house developed stuff, etc, etc.

He used the analogy that, a lot of the Performance Monitoring tools available to companies are like GP’s. They have enough knowledge about many different things. But when they spot something in a particular area, then they need to refer you to a specialist (credit to Stuart Kennedy at eG Innovations).

Sometimes with certain types of apps, you need that specialist information, but that doesn’t mean you should have a tool for every key technology in your business.

We don’t need to consult studies (but they do exist) to understand that lots of different performance monitoring and triage tools are hard and expensive to manage and don’t provide an end to end, correlated view.

We consider all this when advising our own Customers and we always start by looking at the following:


  • What is the Customers’ unique mix of application technologies (what needs monitoring and what’s the best method to acquire the data)
  • What are their strategic plans for the future (how do we make sure this investment is future proof)
  • What do they already have in place that they like and trust (what should we keep and integrate with / work alongside)


This helps us to recommend something that has maximum coverage, integrates with the environment and stops the need to “swivel seats” to troubleshoot issues.

So our advice is to make sure you identify the hard to monitor applications, they’re unfortunately usually one of the most important, and make sure the monitoring technologies you have can provide you with deep enough visibility. But also keep in mind the other applications in your environment and try and select a Vendor that covers as many as possible.

We can, of course, help you with all of this and help build and plan your strategy, but if you are going to do it yourself, whilst reducing tools is a good objective, it’s unlikely one Vendor will cover all your bases, so it’s important to plan how that’s going to work - through integration, visualisation layers, workflow, and process.

If you’d like to learn more, we can help you plan to get better visibility, please get in touch here.

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