It’s easy to talk about Application Performance Engineering as a goal. You just push your team to make sure your products work and that your online presence and properties are easily accessed and valuable to your clients, consumers and external audience. But how do you make this happen.

It’s not a Harry Potter spell, APE occurs with proper application performance management and that only happens with a few, well-thought-out steps. My top four are here…

SLAs – You MUST have measurement of and compliance to your SLAs. Without that, there’s no accountability for the performance of your systems. And without this measurement, you can’t accurately hold SaaS vendors responsible if your applications underperform and you experience loss of function and/or of uptime and by extension, revenue.

User Experience – We all know that if a user isn’t given a fast, full-featured experience, they’re going to wonder why. Worse, they might start looking for other vendors who can offer a better service. When your systems and applications are operating efficiently and users are pleased with their experience, there’s a clear connection to revenue. When it comes down to money, this is a no-brainer. Give a better experience and pocket more profit.

Be the Leader – If you can be first in application performance…and if your product is the one that folks recognize as the leader in the space…you’ve got a winner. Being first with the right product for the right customers is a sure-fire recipe for success. The best way to be first is to watch user experience over time and make improvements where you can. And also locate trends in response time and improve on those as well.

Finally, to best manage application performance, Minimize Disruptions – Take the time to locate root causes of disruptions QUICKLY. Do it now. Do it fast. Because if you can identify the bottlenecks in transactions, you can fix those and improve the entire application performance. If you can find them before the user does, you can prevent disruptions. That leads to a better user experience (see above), and everyone wins.

What are your thoughts on the best way to manage your application performance?