Today organisations are increasingly dependent on the performance of their business applications – which, in turn, depend on the performance of their network. To keep the business running smoothly, the performance of both applications and the network must be maintained at the highest levels. The traditional approach has been to monitor network and application performance separately, using different systems run by different teams. However, the increasing interdependency of applications and networks mean that organisations need an integrated solution if they are to identify the source of any performance problems quickly and solve them before incurring costly downtime.

A new acronym has been defined for the solutions that address this space: Application Aware Network Performance Management (AANPM). Gartner Group has now begun tracking this as a new sector, which they have termed Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics, and are developing a Magic Quadrant on the solutions available. This White Paper examines the need for AANPM and how it helps organisations to optimise the performance of business critical applications while speeding up network and application trouble-shooting and minimising downtime.