A lot can happen in a second, especially if your business is digital. Google receives 68,000 search requests. Amazon averages $2,361 in sales. In this application-centric world, those are just examples of what application outages can cost the business. Imagine if you didn’t even know there was a problem for just one minute. Sixty seconds of downtime would result in almost 3 million unfulfilled Google search requests and it would cost Amazon about $141,660 in missed sales.

In an economy where consumers will abandon an application in six seconds if the experience isn’t satisfying, shopping carts are routinely deserted for poor performance and brand loyalty depends on immediate gratification, one minute of poor application performance can be disastrous for today’s digitally transformed organizations. Businesses must be able to see how their application (which is essentially their business) performs in real time, by the second.

The Need for Speed in Today’s Modern Applications

Those who code fastest will be the winners in a digitally transformed world. To increase velocity, developers are embracing more modern development methodologies such as Agile and using containers and microservices for their flexibility, scalability and speed. This is having a tremendous effect on the technology makeup of today’s applications and services.

Operations must respond to this development speed revolution, especially when applications are deployed in a containerized environment. Consider this: Within 15 seconds of starting a script, an array of newly created containers can alter (or significantly impact) performance and/or quality of an organization’s applications—and its business. If those applications aren’t monitored within the same realm of speed at which the application is morphing, IT Ops won’t know about problems until unhappy customers start calling—something every business wants to avoid.

Traditional application management products architected for monolithic applications struggle with visibility into modern applications. They also struggle to match the speed of change within the modern dynamic applications that digital businesses are rolling out today. In essence, using a traditional tool to monitor modern applications removes the benefits of a high-velocity development process through the increased risk of insufficient monitoring. High-resolution, time-based metrics (i.e., one-second granularity) are critical to modern application performance management.

This need for one-second visibility actually goes beyond monitoring. Operations teams require feedback whenever a new application component is deployed, whether it’s a long-term server, a short-term container or a change of host. With application changes occurring with increased frequency and regularity, feedback is necessary in seconds, not minutes.

One Second Means Business Success or Failure

For monitoring tools to catch up with development progress and innovation, one-second visibility, or granularity, is essential.

In today’s modern, dynamic application world, where the application is the business and possibly the only direct engagement with customers, one second means everything. It can mean the difference between business success or failure.

The technology that allows developers to deploy applications so quickly is a great advantage, but that same attribute—speed—creates a huge hazard if these more complex applications can’t be adequately monitored and managed. The only way to ensure your IT Ops team—and your business—are protected against application outages is to monitor (and manage) your applications on a second-to-second basis.

About the Author / Mirko Novakovic

Mirko Novakovic is CEO and co-founder of Instana, where he brings deep technological experience with a background that includes performance management software, agile development and DevOps. Prior to Instana, Novakovic founded codecentric AG, a leading software consulting firm focused on performance, agile software development and software architecture. He received a Bachelor of Applied Science in Information Technology at Stuttgart University and an SMB Management at the University of St. Gallen. Connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.