Application service management (ASM) is an emerging discipline within

systems management Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including (and commonly in practice) computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications. The ap ...

that focuses on monitoring and managing the

performance A performance is an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Management science In the work place ...

and

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

of business transactions. ASM can be defined as a well-defined process and use of related tools to detect, diagnose, remedy, and report the service quality of complex business transactions to ensure that they meet or exceed

end-user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrat ...

Performance A performance is an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Management science In the work place ...

measurements relate to how fast transactions are completed or information is delivered to the end-user by the aggregate of applications, operating systems,

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is calle ...

s (if applicable), hardware platforms, and network interconnects. The critical components of ASM include application discovery & mapping, application "health" measurement & management, transaction-level visibility, and incident-related triage. Thus, the ASM tools and processes are commonly used by such roles as

Sysop A sysop (; an abbreviation of system operator) is an administrator of a multi-user computer system, such as a bulletin board system (BBS) or an online service virtual community.Jansen, E. & James,V. (2002). NetLingo: the Internet dictionary. Netl ...

DevOps DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (''Dev'') and IT operations (''Ops''). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary to a ...

, and

AIOps Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) is a term coined by Gartner in 2016 as an industry category for machine learning analytics technology that enhances IT operations analytics. AIOps is the acronym of "Artificial Intelligence Operati ...

. ASM is related to

application performance management In the fields of information technology and systems management, application performance management (APM) is the monitoring and management of the performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex appli ...

(APM) but serves as a more pragmatic, "top-down" approach that focuses on the delivery of business services. In a strict definition, ASM differs from APM in two critical ways. # APM focuses exclusively on the performance of an instance of an application, ignoring the complex set of interdependencies that may exist behind that application in the data center. ASM specifically mandates that each application or infrastructure software, operating system, hardware platform, and transactional "hop" be discretely measurable, even if that measurement is inferential. This is critical to ASM's requirement to be able to isolate the source of service-impacting conditions. # APM often requires instrumentation of the application for management and measurability. ASM advocates an application-centric approach, asserting that the application and operating system have comprehensive visibility of an application's transactions, dependencies, whether on-machine or off-machine, as well as the operating system itself and the hardware platform it is running on. Further, an in-context agent can also infer network latencies with a high degree of accuracy, and with a lesser degree of accuracy when the transaction occurs between instrumented and non-instrumented platforms. Application service management extends the concepts of end-user experience management and

real user monitoring Real user monitoring (RUM) is a passive monitoring technology that records all user interaction with a website or client interacting with a server or cloud-based application. Monitoring actual user interaction with a website or an application is i ...

in that measuring the experience of real users is a critical data point. However, ASM also requires the ability to quickly isolate the root cause of those slow-downs, thereby expanding the scope of real user monitoring/management. The use of application service management is common for complex, multi-tier transactional applications. Further, the introduction of

service-oriented architecture In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provide ...

and

microservices A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightw ...

approaches together with

-based

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

technologies have proven a catalyst for the adoption of ASM technologies, as complex applications are disproportionately impacted by the introduction of hypervisors into an existing environment A study by the

Aberdeen Group Aberdeen is an international marketing intelligence company. Aberdeen's headquarters is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States, with an additional US office location in Wilton, CT, as well as three European offices in Versailles (France), ...

indicates that most deployments of virtualization technologies are hampered by their impact on complex transactional applications. More and more often ASM approaches are equipped in automated adaptive controllers that consider

service-level agreement A service-level agreement (SLA) is a commitment between a service provider and a customer. Particular aspects of the service – quality, availability, responsibilities – are agreed between the service provider and the service user. T ...

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

real-time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

and energy-aware application controller targets.

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See also