Challenges of managing applications

One of the most important lessons that businesses have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is the increased need to test and monitor their applications. With more people accessing applications remotely, maintaining these applications while business grows requires even more attention to detail. Here are five challenges that businesses face as they strive to develop a healthy testing and monitoring strategy.

Management costs

Starting with the topic that many stakeholders are most concerned about, it is important to understand the full cost of application monitoring. This naturally includes hardware procurement and operational costs, but it also includes the time spent creating web application workflows, as well as other expenses that may not exceed the monitoring solution itself.

The reality is that most IT teams have been asked to do more with fewer resources. It is important to adopt testing and monitoring solutions that can provide the most functionality for the cost while alleviating operational friction. Features such as integration with third-party application performance monitoring tools can help keep costs under control by requiring the purchase of fewer tools and helping limited staff spend less time on manual tasks.

Ensuring scalability

Closely related to the issue of cost is the need to monitor scalability. It’s one thing to write code to check the functionality of your application during development, but for many organizations, it’s another to scale it up in production. One important technology to implement is synthetic monitoring. With synthetic monitoring, it’s possible to simulate the user journey, accurately representing how your users access your application from anywhere in the world, in a controlled and mutable environment. This approach can monitor not only on-premises and web applications, but also endpoints and websites. Synthetic monitoring helps identify key factors that may affect the user experience, including infrastructure that limits page load times, transit network instability, and third-party service integrations. Without a way to fully view all of your application’s dependencies at scale, you only see part of the picture.

Leverage automation to improve efficiency

Efficiency in application development is an important strategic shift in mindset for many businesses. Focusing on “shifting left” to solve problems early in the application development process also applies to monitoring, and knowing from an early stage how an application will behave in today’s complex enterprise environments is critical. Automated application testing during development can ensure that you don’t run into any unpleasant surprises when deploying. This proactive testing can tell you how an application should behave from a user perspective when it is scaled up to meet the stringent demands of peak times.

Additionally, these same automation tools, if implemented properly, should allow you to perform “shift-right” testing to ensure your live environment is performing well compared to your initial performance testing. To gain visibility into your applications, you need a complete SDLC testing and monitoring solution that can provide you with critical insights at all points in the product lifecycle. To meet this need, application owners should leverage automation to streamline scripting requirements, take advantage of tools that can automatically import the same test scripts used earlier in the development cycle into production, while integrating into existing technology platforms to save time and money.

Addressing security issues

Security is always a top priority for businesses, and there are several key considerations to keep in mind when developing a testing and monitoring strategy. Every business will have its own requirements, but many will need to monitor secure applications because they are accessed through single sign-on, PIV smart cards, or other technologies. Another recurring need is protecting credentials used to access repositories behind firewalls or using third-party programs such as CyberArk. While ensuring your user data is secure through impersonation checks is important to maintaining a secure application environment, there are several security gaps that can and should be factored into any good monitoring plan. Meeting the unique needs of each organization requires a solution that has the flexibility to work with tools from any manufacturer and is frequently updated and supported to keep up with evolving security needs.

Reporting Tools

Even when an organization's testing and monitoring capabilities are configured correctly, it can be difficult to effectively analyze the data they produce. Network infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex, and the amount of data generated by monitoring solutions is growing rapidly as more applications are adopted. The result can be a lack of real insight despite an overabundance of information. In many environments, the signal-to-noise ratio is too high to expect more monitoring to deliver real value. What is needed is insight that can be used to help companies answer tough business questions.

When you evaluate testing options, it’s important to consider their reporting capabilities, as well as their ability to consolidate and analyze data from a variety of sources. Effective analytics includes the ability to create customized reports for different stakeholders to gain insights that a business-focused audience, rather than a technical expert, can understand and act on.

Final Thoughts

As IT application environments evolve, so too do user needs. Customers and employees alike are accustomed to accessing the applications they want, whenever and wherever they want, and have no patience for interruptions or even slow performance. Addressing these challenges, or preventing them altogether, requires a strong monitoring strategy. By taking a proactive approach to testing and monitoring at every step of the user journey, you can protect the bottom line and keep critical functions running without interruption.