About two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of demonstrating the latest release of the INETCO Insight application performance monitoring (APM) solution to the former CIO of Gap, Inc. Full disclosure: he’s an INETCO board member and has been one of our closest advisors for over three years.

A third of the way into my well-worn demo groove, he stopped me and said, “Wait second, what are you doing there? Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

I had just drilled down into a web transaction and was showing the various moving parts of it using the screen below:

I had been describing how INETCO Insight reconstructs the overall business process and the various time durations, including the user’s think time, as well as the “technical” processing time for each individual transaction. Our dialogue went kind of like this:

CIO: “So this screen reconstructs an end-to-end business process and shows all the transactions that are involved?”

Me: “Yes”

CIO: “And it tells me how long the user is thinking between steps AND how long my IT infrastructure is taking to handle each transaction?”

Me: “Yes”

CIO: “So, this can tell me if a business process is failing or slow because of process design issues or technical issues?”

Me: “Yes”

CIO: “So I can tell which step failed, who was affected, how many dollars were at risk and whose problem this is, all on this one screen?”

Me: “Yes”

CIO: “This is the way to talk about application performance.”

He went on to explain how critical this capability is in a modern application environment, where operations teams often have to work with a wide range of people, from customer experts, to usability and process design specialists, to data base admins, network engineers, applications support and virtualization teams to understand performance issues and resolve them quickly.

Having context matters. IT operations teams need to understand the relationships between all the moving parts of distributed application environments, including end users, and how all these moving parts impact business process delivery. This context allows you to have meaningful conversations about business transaction management, the end customer experience and application performance management with the CIO and other business leaders.

To learn more about how INETCO Insight provides this context, download the INETCO Insight Product Overview Whitepaper and read about the Unified Transaction Model, multi-hop transaction correlation, and application payload message decoding – three technical capabilities that have a real business impact.