Performance Monitoring Questions Answers

Insurance IT Checklist for Purchasing the Right Application Performance Monitoring Solution

Any IT manager managing technology that supports the insurance industry knows how important it is to meet strict standards of performance. Violation of government regulations can be extremely costly. Add the value gained from meeting the expectations of insurance customers, and the importance of what IT does to support the business is immeasurable.

How does an IT manager sort through the different application performance monitoring (APM) solutions available in the marketplace? The following checklist should be of assistance.

Application Performance Monitoring Checkpoint #1
Does the APM solution include business transaction management capabilities?

Business transaction management (BTM) reduces the costs associated with IT management because it improves application performance and availability. A BTM solution accomplishes this through deep-dive visibility into each insurance transaction. From first notice of loss (FNOL), to assignment, coverage, contact, investigation and evaluation, negotiation and settlement, litigation management and recovery and salvage, IT gains real-time insights how each insurance transaction is impacting the business.

Business transaction management provides a number of key services within an application performance monitoring solution:

Visibility into every transaction as it interacts with the multiple platforms common to today’s complex insurance IT enterprises. Whether the transaction occurs in the cloud, middleware layer or any one of the other components of the IT enterprise (networks, web servers, application servers, databases, etc.), BTM makes it possible to find the root cause of a performance or availability issue before users are impacted or business processes are disrupted.
Ability to track interdependent insurance transactions to gain deep real-time insights into application interactions and the business transactions they comprise as they cross tiers from Windows to Unix to mainframe.
Ability to monitor the entire end-use experience so that the discovery of potential transaction problems happens before those problems reach the user. Down-time and other user impacting events are reduced or eliminated entirely.
Ability to prevent  problems – outage avoidance
Ability to answer the question, “Where is my claim?” quickly because the BTM solution sorts through the hundreds of thousands of interdependent transactions instantly.
Application Performance Monitoring Checkpoint #2
Does the APM solution have an integrated complex event processing (CEP) engine?

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Integrating the complex event processing (CEP) engine into the design of the application performance monitoring solution gives the APM solution the ability to expand. This technology makes it possible to analyze the event cloud event-driven information systems produce. Tracking hundreds of thousands of transactions a day is pointless if the information gathered cannot be interpreted and analyzed.

When complex event processing is central to the design of an application performance monitoring solution, there are a number of benefits insurance IT managers experience:

Ability to identify event hierarchies.
Ability to detect complex patterns of events and the relationships occurring between these events.
Ability to correlate these patterns to specific transaction behaviors.
Ability to automate detection processes through inference.
Ability to approach problem management proactively instead of reactively.
Application Performance Monitoring Checkpoint #3
Does the APM solution include application performance management capabilities?

Application performance management moves beyond monitoring the performance of applications. It provides IT managers with the tools they need to manage the applications with the IT environment. While a software solution may contain a complex event processing (CEP) engine, the ability of the CEP to provide diagnosis and recommend proactive action depends on whether it has been designed to provide application performance managing information.

Not only must an APM software solution be capable of using deep-dive tools to collect real-time data, it must also correlate that data into real-time analysis of the entire enterprise system. Whether managing the data center or the claims processing business process, application performance management provides uses sampling, correlations and stitching techniques to pull all the relevant information together.

Application Performance Monitoring Checkpoint #4
Does the APM solution provide dynamic dashboards?

Ease of access to the information provided by an APM solution is an important consideration. The dashboard needs to be customizable so it provides a range of views based on the information being sought.

If all of the above components aren’t in place—business transaction management, application performance management, integrated complex event processing (CEP) engine, and user-friendly dynamic dashboards, then the solution could fail to provide the results you desire as an insurance IT manager.

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