Effective application performance management needs a life-cycle approach.

Developers tend to work in single server environments and performance problems often go unnoticed until later in the life cycle when:

• QA A finishes functional testing and starts verifying performance characteristics,
• Performance analysts start performance and longevity testing to develop multi-server configuration guidelines,
• Operations deploys the application into production, and
• When customers complain or abandon transactions after the system has gone live.
  

Due to the complexity of performance problems, it takes a painful amount of time before the root cause is identified. An unhappy situation such as one depicted in Figure 4 often results before the problem is resolved.

To prevent such troublesome situations and to deliver a high performance system, IT needs to pay attention to performance issues throughout the application life-cycle.

Figure 5 outlines performance related roles and responsibilities of different players and the information flow among them.

Figure 5 outlines performance related roles and responsibilities of different players and the information flow among them.