Application Performance Management: 10 Questions to Ask Before Buying

InformationWeek/CA: In this white paper, InformationWeek covers the basics of application performance management (APM) and suggests 10 questions to ask that will help determine whether an APM solution will deliver true business value. They are:

1. Which applications can be monitored?
2. How does the product discover the root cause of a performance problem across application, system and network layers?
3. How does the product collect infrastructure data, including server hardware, OS, application and network performance information?
4. Does the product require proprietary agents?
5. How does the product collect data, and is that method right for my environment? Is it a hardware appliance or software?
6. What performance reporting is available?
7. How complex is the product to deploy, maintain, support and configure?
8. How does the product deal with next-generation infrastructure technologies, particularly virtualization?
9. What is your automation roadmap?
10. What advanced integration is available?