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Application Performance Measurement

APM has emerged as a popular way to gauge the performance of applications by measuring the quality of service that end users experience. IT managers have been using APM to ensure higher quality and customer satisfaction and to measure SLAs (service-level agreements), as well as to communicate with end users in terms those users understand. Vendors have been quick to adopt APM, and many are refining second- and third-generation solutions.

Now that APM has reached this level of adoption, the next step is the creation of industry standards so customers know what to expect from APM products and to ensure interoperability among them.

To meet these goals, the IETF is creating a new standard, the APM MIB. The APM MIB starts by defining common terminology and common statistics for measuring the availability and responsiveness of applications, from the Web to ERP to streaming media. The APM MIB builds upon this by providing common data-summarization techniques and a standard way of getting APM data from collection software to a central network-management station. With the standard nearing completion, we can expect to see compliant products in the coming year.