What is Application Fitness Monitoring?

Businesses need software applications in order to function smoothly. Especially with Digital Transformation today, the importance of efficient application inventory is being addressed more and more. If a business has a flawlessly running application inventory that answers to its needs, it is less probable that it will suffer from problems such as business delays, malfunctions, compliance discrepancies etc. This is because everything they own digitally is accounted for in a standardized way. Keeping track of these assets is crucial, particularly when the rapid speed of contemporary business is considered. Find out more about how Digital Transformation changed the game by reading “How to Track Assets in a Digital World?”.

SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions gained popularity with Digital Transformation. But how exactly do businesses keep track of their digital assets? Why do they spend time and effort to compile the applications and analyse their efficiency? What is the reason for monitoring how an application is running and when they need maintenance? These are some key questions to comprehend the importance of IT Asset Management (ITAM).

What is IT Asset Management (ITAM)?

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is the comprehensive process of monitoring and governing all the components of the IT landscape in a business. All the digital and physical belongings are of importance in order to conduct robust IT Asset Management. With ITAM, application inventories are structured and all the members of the inventory are accounted for. By keeping track of them, a business can analyse

• Application fitness
• Application real value
• Application running cost
• Application criticality
• Application efficiency
• Application reliability

And many other insights into the IT landscape. So, IT Asset Management is a good way to provide a company with data to be used in corporate decisions by pointing out how the business operations are making use of the software procured by the company.

Find more info about how an IT Asset Management software like Loggle will help you scale your business by reading 5 Ways Loggle Will Help Optimize How Your Business Uses IT.

An important item of the list above, Application fitness is a comprehensive notion that evaluates the overall quality of an application. A fit application is the one running efficiently without malfunctions, helping the business to achieve its operational goals specified within its strategies. Let’s analyse application fitness a bit more.

What is Application Fitness?

A software application’s main task is to run smoothly in order to fulfil the business tasks that require the application’s competencies. This is the main pivot to evaluate the fitness level of an application: if it is running smoothly, efficiently, and create added value. A business meeting app, for example, should provide high connection quality. At least, this is the natural expectation. But some problems may occur and the service quality of an application might get affected negatively. For example,

• Bugs
• Integration problems
• Compatibility issues
• Insufficient running memory
• High interface complexity
• Manuel errors
• Malfunctions while updating
• Migration difficulties

Reasons for an application to halt or delay can be multiplied. This is only natural and, more importantly, can be prevented or foreseen by Application Fitness Monitoring.

What is Application Fitness Monitoring?

Application Fitness Monitoring is the observation of malfunctions and evaluation of the efficiency of an application in a business’ application portfolio. Overall, there are 3 types of application fitness:

1. Business Fitness: Evaluating how efficient the application is supporting the business needs and identifying the business processes that the application is used in.
2. Technical Fitness: Analysing the technical aspects of the application and measuring how well its coding structures the application.
3. Cost Fitness: Comparing the expenditure of the application and the value it creates for the business.

Monitoring the life cycle of an asset would also tell a lot about the fitness of an application. An application life cycle is the monitoring of the important steps during the period an application is used by the company from procurement to the end of its life. By monitoring the life cycles of an application, the business could get info about how frequent the application is having maintenance problems and how much value the upgrades add to the application’s business, technical, and cost fitness. These important steps of an application’s business journey are stored and can be analysed during, for example, Application Rationalization. Application Rationalization is the overall evaluation of an application. You could get a more comprehensive picture of Application Rationalization by checking out the article.