Taking advantage of data you gathered during performance testing is a great way to build your operation's teams knowledge and productivity on your newly deployed applications. Application monitoring allows you to continually monitor and learn about your application to help ensure you meet SLA's for your products.

There are generally two different types of application performance monitoring: end user monitoring and system monitoring.

End User Monitoring
End user monitoring uses analytical and metric gathering software to simulate business processes that an end user would execute while using an application. Measuring the individual steps of a business process allows you to report on defined KPI's. An example of a business process for a banking website might be:

1. Login
2. View checking account
3. View savings account
4. Logout

Using HP's Business Availability Center (BAC), now Business Service Management (BSM), you can create Business Process Monitors to simulate these end user transactions.

System Monitoring
System monitoring is the use of tools to capture system specific metrics, such as CPU utilization or disk usage. System monitoring is a mix of art and science. Gathering too much information on a system can have a negative impact on your systems being monitored, but too few monitors can lead to unexpected outages. Using HP's SiteScope, Rextency Technologies can help you design and deploy a monitoring strategy built around industry best practices.

By using HP's BAC and SiteScope in concert you can build full monitoring profiles for your applications giving you insight into both the end user experience and system resource usage.