INFORMATIONWEEK REPORTS
Strategy: Calculating APM Costs
APM: How to Calculate Your Costs
Application performance management (APM) software and hardware are essential for organizations that need to monitor and manage critical applications. APM products can help IT maintain high levels of uptime for end users and customers, meet service-level agreements (SLAs), and identify and resolve problems quickly.
But while APM tools are useful, they are also very expensive. Depending on the types of applications being monitored, the complexity of the application environment and the monitoring approaches adopted, an APM deployment can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even in the best of economic circumstances (anyone remember those?), IT must get in front of the CFO to outline how much an APM product set will cost and justify how the project will benefit the company.
How much does it cost to deploy APM products? We’ll find out in this report, using a total cost of ownership (TCO) model based on a fictional company called Acme Enterprises. We’ll examine all the costs involved in an APM deployment, including predeployment work such as analyzing the gap between the organization’s needs and existing products, and creating application dependency maps of critical services. We’ll also explore the costs of integration, software and hardware, licenses, and ongoing operations and maintenance. The report includes a reusable spreadsheet that organizations can use to plug in their own numbers. Our model is designed to help organizations ask the right questions of vendors and build an accurate cost model prior to deployment. (S2161210)
