Today, more and more IT organizations have stated plans to migrate to the cloud to improve operational cost efficiencies and to provide better services to the business users.

The challenge that these companies face lies around the choice of an application performance management solution which would best fit their need and at the same time gives them the desired output.

For many of the public cloud service providers anticipating the demand from businesses to prove performance of application delivery with Service Level Agreements is at the forefront.

Businesses today demand Service Level Agreements from their service providers and a view of the performance of the services they subscribe to. So the choice of the solution needs to be capable of collecting and reporting service level metrics, such as end user response time, traffic usage, and volume for each business accounts. The architecture of such solutions needs to be multi-tenant - meaning it can collect, analyze, host and report on performance metrics for each individual business account.

As more and more businesses leverage the cloud to support and extend infrastructure, managing application performance will play an increasingly vital role for success. Whether using a hybrid private cloud, or cloud service from a provider, it's key that businesses have insight into whether or not application services are being delivered according to availability and performance objectives.

The immediate answer to such a solution lies around this new offering from IBM, this product delivers a subset of IBM's full monitoring capabilities in a product design ideally suited for Cloud monitoring and delivery. It addresses the requirements of businesses running application workloads on public Clouds or on similar platforms where deployment of traditional APM toolsets is not feasible. This new solution is built on new technology where agents run autonomously. They monitor the local operating system and Web response time behavior on their host virtual machines, and share their data "on demand" with a lightweight management node deployed as "just another virtual machine" in the customer environment.

Some of its key Benefits and differentiators are:-

1. Easy acquisition (via Web download) and deployment model for Development teams,   Application Managers, Line of Business, and departmental buyers who need immediate access to APM capabilities without long approval or ramp-up cycles.

2. Bottom-up monitoring focused on consumers, not infrastructure

• Web response time monitoring provides application owners with an intuitive way to understand application health in context to user experience.
  
• Real-time monitoring for business critical services.
  
• Alert triggers on threshold violations, user experience issues, and operating system problems.
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3. Ease of deployment, elastic scaling, self-maintaining

• Automated discovery of newly deployed instances dispenses with the need to manually configure agents and monitoring environments.
• Monitoring agents can be embedded in virtual machine images or patterns, so newly deployed application instances are automatically tied to the appropriate business service dashboard.

4. Multi-tenant

• Multi-tenancy simplifies chargeback process since corporate IT organizations can become service providers themselves.
• Provides "APM as a Service" option for third-party vendors seeking to deliver lightweight APM capabilities.
• Each "customer" receives a separate dashboard with visibility only to its own applications.

5. APM capabilities extended to new use cases such as SLA monitoring:

• Application support teams can become their own monitoring administrators, using application and operating system health views to confirm Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their hosting providers.

The combination of a lightweight solution, ease of installation, ease of use, and minimal ongoing maintenance sets the stage for a new approach to application performance management. In addition,the fact that it is both elastic and expandable makes IBM SmartCloud Monitoring - Application Insight an excellent option for fast growing companies of any size.

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