By Richard Arneson
Performance monitoring. It’s a pretty generic term. It’s like Lots of moving parts, Best practices, Thinking outside the box….we could list them until Boston releases its 3rd album (for the over 50-year-old reader). But in the IoT world we live in, performance monitoring is a critical component of whether the technology delivers on its promises, or results in little more than a nuisance to your IT staff. And a critical component of a technology that is estimated to exceed $1.3 trillion in spending within the next three (3) years makes it pretty critical.
Whether it’s a wearable, a thermostat, a doorbell or an appliance, IoT is creeping into all facets of our everyday lives. It has already had a tremendous impact on society, both here and abroad, and, while it may be hard to imagine how it will continue to affect our lives, bet on this: it will, and for a long time.
Here’s the IoT conundrum
With the number of new devices on the market and its precipitous growth, management of IoT devices is unwieldy and requires considerable man hours.
IoT is a little like Austin, Texas. Everybody loves it and thinks it’s cool, but its popularity and perceived hipness caused it to outgrow its infrastructure. When Austin was only home to the University of Texas and state government, driving from one end to the other was a piece of cake, a 10-minute trip. Then the growth came, and came, and came, and the number of businesses and transplanted workers burst its infrastructure at the seams. Have you tried driving around Austin lately? The Let’s Keep Austin Weird slogan should be changed to Let’s keep Austin under 3 million people.
IoT is busting out of its seams. IT departments are having trouble managing it, as personnel are spending inordinate amounts of time trying to locate the sources of issues, not to mention how to fix them. Exponentially more amounts of data are traversing the network, making capacity planning and the management of it more complex and daunting. And with IoT growth comes the need for more robust hardware, complex applications and ecosystems, new protocols and security requirements, additional backup needs, and better, faster transmission technologies. IT departments, like Austin, are having trouble keeping up.
How to combat the conundrum
AppDynamics is a 10-year-old San Francisco-based application performance management (APM) and operations analytics company that was purchased by Cisco in March of 2017. Their focus? Performance and availability management across cloud environments, including the data center. Their APM product, AppDynamics APM, allows issues to be easily detected, then remediated quickly and cost-effectively. You can read about what they did for Nasdaq, the largest, by volume, U.S. stock exchange here. Think for a second what a service outage could mean to Nasdaq.
Here’s how AppDynamics APM works…
With AppDynamics’ IoT advanced performance monitoring and management tools, customers get real-time diagnostics and, more importantly, solutions to issues that pop up on the radar screen. The tools deliver exactly what’s needed in an IoT-intensive environment: smooth, simple configuration, easier deployment and provisioning, and the ongoing maintenance of all IoT-connected devices. Through predictive analytics and business intelligence, customers get alerts concerning potential problems, so they can be proactively remediated before the potential problem becomes a real one, such as a network outage.
According to the MIT Technology Review, far and away the top two (2) benefits of application performance monitoring for IoT are improved performance and security. With AppDynamics APM, those benefits—and much more—are exactly what customers get.
IOT and APM? Think GDT
While being an exciting technology, IoT only becomes beneficial to organizations if its deployment results in economies of scale, cost efficiencies, optimization of resources, better customer service and satisfaction, and, ultimately, higher revenue. And that’s why consulting with IoT professionals like those at GDT is not only critically important now, but will become more so day by day. GDT’s tenured, talented solutions architects, engineers and security analysts understand how to incorporate IoT and APM tools to help customers realize more productivity, enhanced operations and greater revenue. GDT helps organizations transform their legacy environments into highly productive digital infrastructures and architectures. You can reach them at SolutionsArchitects@GDT.com or at Engineering @GDT.com. They’d love to hear from you.
You can read more about IoT below:
How Does IoT fit in with SD-WAN?
Five (5) things to consider prior to your IoT journey
Can’t wait for 5G? The FCC has done something to speed up your wait time
Sexy, yes, but potentially dangerous
What is digital transformation?
Why companies are turning to Mobility Managed Solutions (MMS)?
