BlogLong gone are the days when applications were these monolithic stand-alone blocks of code. Today, modern applications rely on complex and highly dynamic architectures, interacting via APIs, leveraging microservices, and deployed in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Indeed, according to IDC, 80% of application development will shift to cloud platforms using microservices and cloud functions, and over 95% of new microservices will be deployed in containers by 2021.
Enterprises are responsible for more and more technologies, making the application delivery chain much more complex with more interdependencies and more potential points of failure. Therefore, monitoring exclusively the code of applications or app servers doesn't give you the full picture. User experience no longer depends solely on the code residing at the core of the application. A multitude of elements, such as firewalls, DNS, cloud platforms, or load balancers, can have a significant impact on how your customers are able to interact with your service and hence how they perceive your business.
When it comes to detecting and remediating performance issues, APM tools can bring valuable insights about the code of your applications but fall short at providing any insights concerning the other elements involved in the delivery of your revenue-generating applications. Looking only at the brain of applications is no longer enough. IT Operations teams need complete visibility to be able to detect any threats or anomalies from core to edge to cloud.
In addition, the complexity of hybrid environments leads to a multiplication of operational and monitoring silos within IT organizations. Applications are sliced into multiple tiers, each managed by a different team using its own data set and single-purpose tool to monitor performance. This siloed organization might help limit service disruption when an application needs to be upgraded, but it also makes issue detection and root cause identification much more difficult.
Because each team looks at a small portion of the application through its own lenses, the entire IT organization ends up wasting valuable time playing the blame game, which causes extensive mean time to resolution and ineffective use of IT resources and staff. Indeed, 545 hours of staff productivity are lost annually because of IT outages. And it's not just a matter of wasted time—enterprises spend also a lot of money trying to fix application degradations and downtime.
According to IDC, the average cost of critical application failure is between $500,000 and $1,000,000 per hour. And this is just an average. Last year Amazon's website went down for a little bit over an hour as soon as Prime Day launched, it has been estimated that the e-Commerce giant lost between $72 and $99 million during this short period of time. Today, customers have high expectations and do not have the patience for slow or under-performing applications. 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
When customers use your applications, they see your business and if your applications are not delivering their promises it will inevitably translate into damaged brand image and lost revenue. The stakes are high and the limited scope of APM tools make IT Ops unequipped to sustain the performance of the business as a whole. End-to-end visibility across the entire IT environment from core to edge to cloud is a necessity for enterprises who want to maintain their competitive edge and deliver the best user experience.
Your applications are more than just code. This is why it is critical to complement your APM tools with wire data to eliminate all blind spots in your application delivery chain. Wire data is the richest and most empirical source of truth as it comes from the all the transactions occurring on the network. It enables you to transcend the complexity of your revenue-generating applications with end-to-end visibility across your hybrid environment. Even though wire data is network-based, it is not reserved for Net Ops. On the contrary, wire data solutions like ExtraHop help IT organizations to rise above the silos and stop wasting time in war rooms.
As a matter of fact, in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics, in which ExtraHop is recognized as a new leader, Gartner affirms that more and more enterprises use network data outside of the network monitoring context. Architects, application teams and even business decision-makers see the cross-organizational value of wire data for application performance. Many teams can benefit from insights provided by wire data, and many ExtraHop customers, managing complex and highly dynamic applications, have deployed ExtraHop across several teams to expedite time to resolution and improve performance and availability. GTA, a global travel leader, is one of them and uses wire data to enhance speed and reliability for their travel-booking applications and deliver superior user experience to millions of customers.
Whether you are rolling out a new critical application, willing to improve user experience or migrating an application to the cloud, wire data eliminates the blind spots left by APM solutions and provides a holistic view across the full application delivery chain, correlating metrics across tiers and mapping dependencies to help IT Operations teams understand everything from the infrastructure to the user experience.
Curious to see how much more visibility ExtraHop brings compared to APM tools? Check out this infographic and visit our page for more information.
