From its roots as a mainframe performance discipline implemented throughout the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Application Performance Management (APM) has become increasingly important as end users rely on ever more complex applications to enable critical business transactions. Having expanded beyond the mainframe environment into the distributed, web-enabled world, APM has gained a necessary end-to-end context, focusing on the identification, prioritization and resolution of performance and availability problems affecting business applications.

This paper examines - in datacenter operations that involve the integration of mainframe, distributed and web-based systems - how APM influences, and is influenced by, the generally more structured tools and processes available on the mainframe.