Over the past decade, IT organizations have increasingly focused on ensuring acceptable application delivery, leveraging two main disciplines: application performance management (APM) and network and application optimization (NAO). Both of these disciplines are traditionally practiced in a reactive fashion, after an application has been developed or a major change has been made to the infrastructure. Increasingly, this risks and costs of this reactive approach are becoming less tolerable.
This white paper describes an emerging discipline: application performance engineering (APE). The goal of APE is to proactively help IT organizations reduce risk and manage a better relationship with the company’s business unit managers. APE achieves this goal by anticipating, and wherever possible, eliminating performance problems at every stage of the application development lifecycle.