The Relationship Between APE and APM

From Network World: http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/frame/2011/022111wan1.html

This is the ninth in a series of newsletters that have been discussing a seldom-mentioned IT discipline - Application Performance Engineering (APE). In this newsletter we will compare APE and application performance management (APM).

APM is a relatively new management discipline. The newness of APM is attested to by the fact that ITIL has yet to create a framework for APM. Our definition of APM is that it is the people, processes and tools used to detect, diagnose and report on an application's performance once that application is in production. APM can be used to identify the fact that the response time of an application is beginning to degrade and could for example determine that the cause of that degradation is an unusually high level of delay that sporadically occurs in the application server. APM would not, however, identify why the software that was running on the application server was experiencing high levels of sporadic delay and hence, in this example, APM can't identify the true root cause of the performance degradation.

APM solutions are available from a wide range of companies including CA, HP, IBM, Apparent Networks, Xangati and Ipswitch. Since, as noted, these tools are used to monitor production networks, they don't provide any value during the design or development stages of the application life cycle. As we have been discussing, a linchpin of APE is establishing performance objectives and testing throughout the application life cycle to ensure that these objectives are being met.  

In contrast, most APM solutions rely on analytics to establish a baseline and then report significant deviations from that baseline. However, unlike at least some APE solutions, most APM solutions also produce performance dashboards and historical reports that allow both IT and business managers to gain insight into service-level agreement compliance and performance trends. In some instances APM solutions can front end an APE solution. For example, once an APM solution has identified that an application is experiencing systemic performance problems, an APE solution can be used to identify the root cause and to evaluate alternative solutions.