Performance Monitoring

Insurance IT – Application Performance Monitoring and Application Performance Management

Information technology (IT) is vital to successful business no matter what sector of the insurance industry it serves. Healthcare, casualty, property—all depend on the ability to retain happy customers and manage risk effectively. IT must facilitate the prompt and accurate service customers expect. It must also facilitate the accurate and secure records necessary for insurance staff to process claims properly.

IT by nature is an extremely complex environment. Every day there are literally hundreds of thousands of interdependent transactions occurring inside an insurance company’s IT environment. It is impossible to ensure trouble-free processing of these interdependent transactions without using automated, deep-dive forensic tools to monitor applications, messaging middleware and transactions. Application performance monitoring is the solution because it ensures that IT is doing what it is supposed to do—serve the mission of the insurance business it services.

Clearing up Confusion – Comparing Application Performance Monitoring and Application Performance Management

The term application performance monitoring is often confused with application performance management for good reason. They both used the acronym APM and are often used interchangeably to describe the process of automatically discovering applications, business transactions and messaging middleware. Both terms describe the process of:

1)      APM measuring their performance

2)      APM Comparing this performance to service level agreements (SLAs)

3)      APM issuing alerts when problems are detected.

Application Performance Management can include all of the prior capabilities plus the ability to take action to improve performance.

What Application Performance Monitoring Does for Insurance IT

Application performance monitoring in the insurance IT enterprise uses instrumentation to capture events and metrics, then sends the information to an application performance monitoring database that stores historical application data. This enables dynamic queries and after-the-fact analysis. Insurance IT managers can use application performance monitoring to detect response time problems, bottlenecks, failures and application availability issues. They can also  use application performance monitoring to detect the root cause of failures or performance degradations. The best solutions include automated alerts and the ability to respond and resolve issues automatically.

Application performance monitoring must go beyond mere monitoring in order to provide sufficient value.. Why?  Because this is a reactive approach that is costly and does not effectively address the needs of users, and the mounting costs of support.  Utilizing a complex event processing (CEP) engine can improve this by predicting problems and preventing their impact to users and business processes.

It is also necessary that application performance monitoring performs deep-dive discovery so that when a problem occurs there is sufficient data to resolve the issue and not merely isolate it to a tier or application.  For example a business transaction monitoring solution may be able to detect a problem, but without the ability to explain why the problem occurred (information which comes from the deep-dive discovery), it does not have the necessary information to resolve the issue. The result?  Users are still affected and business processes are impacted.  Costs continue to escalate.   Problem resolution cannot be expedited rapidly until transaction behaviors are correlated to underlying infrastructure issues with sufficient detail to determine root cause. Nor can problem resolution occur early enough to prevent impact.

Importance of Complex Event Processing in Application Performance Monitoring

The design of the complex event processing (CEP) engine has an effect on the performance capabilities the application performance monitoring solution. It is the “brain” of the solution. When it is included as a core component of the monitoring solution, it enables the application performance monitoring solution to expand its abilities to predict and even prevent problems. Governance layers can dynamically describe complex sets of events and metrics as situations. These same governance layers can prevent those same situations from ever occurring again.

Complex event processing makes it possible to do more than monitor each application’s performance and monitor individual transactions. With the right complex event processing design, meaning can be applied to the interactions between all the applications that comprise a business process.

Of course, the ability to view the data analysis created by the complex event processing engine is another vital component of any application performance solution. And it is also essential that problems are prioritized by business impact A flexible dashboard design that allows insurance IT managers to create the reports they need and to access the information they need in a productive, user friendly way is important. This not only makes it easy to interpret information; it makes visualizing the applications and/or issues that are discovered possible.

Is there an application performance monitoring solution already in the marketplace that services the insurance IT industry and provides all of these necessary components? There is. Nastel Technologies has been serving the insurance, manufacturing and financial industries through its AutoPilot application performance monitoring solution for well over 15 years now. AutoPilot is a product that has been adapting to the changes in IT needs—from service oriented architecture (SOA), applications spanning both distributed and mainframe tiers and cloud computing —AutoPilot embraces change while enhancing the functionality of older architecture designs and applications.

Nastel’s AutoPilot monitors and correlates information from all tiers and provides a 360°, fully transparent view of how all the applications, middleware and transactions are performing. Join the other insurance IT managers who have discovered the benefits of using AutoPilot’s application performance monitoring capabilities. Others have found that installing AutoPilot as part of their IT management strategy has saved thousands of dollars, not only in IT costs, but in other costs related to providing insurance services.  They have also discovered that AutoPilot does more than save money, AutoPilot’s frees up IT staff to work on adding new services and in effect to help grow the business.

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