Nastel Provides Best Practice Tips for Retailers to Ensure Their Business-Critical Applications Remain Healthy and Viable Through the Holiday Season

Melville, NY – Nov. 22, 2011 – The most important six weeks of the year are upon retailers and businesses alike as they look to the holiday shopping season to close out their books in the black. It makes no difference whether you’re a brick and mortar or online retailer -- your livelihood depends on the reliability of mission-critical applications that run your business.

Whether you realize it or not, your business relies on applications to do everything from running the cash registers, tracking inventory and managing shipments of goods from the warehouses to your stores. They help manage personnel, adjust in-store inventories to meet regional and seasonal needs, launch promotions and sales, and enact price changes.

Business applications manage the flow of a tremendous amount of time-critical information between stores, warehouses and management offices. If these applications fail to perform, or even so much as slow down, the business could suffer substantial losses in revenue. Nastel, a premier global provider of application performance monitoring  solutions for mission-critical applications from the datacenter to the cloud, today announced the following best practices retailers should implement when using an application performance management solution in order to maintain these business-critical applications and ensure a good holiday season.

• Use an application performance management (APM) solution to better identify and understand the performance of your applications both pre-production and in production. APM allows you to determine an application’s capacity to handle the load of peak traffic and to recognize any negative impacts that may occur when multiple business transactions are executed concurrently.  While load testing may return a variety of results, using an APM solution will evaluate whether your applications have hidden interdependency conflicts in real-time.  Get your policies for handling this worked out in pre-production and then use them in production.

• Continuously measure application performance and its impact on the end-user. APM solutions can identify where application issues are impeding follow-through on transactions. Identifying that certain user action isn’t executing before the holiday rush significantly reduces the chances that multiple users will abandon their shopping baskets and take their business elsewhere when that same application doesn’t execute on high-volume days.

• Use APM to provide early warning about potential problems across the application stack.  APM ensures that you are catching minor changes that may cascade into larger issues later. Automate the APM process to ensure you’re recognizing these issues before they get ahead of you. Also, automation will ensure that event storms with large volumes of  event data are downsized into useable, prioritized information, which includes warnings and automated corrective actions.

“Many revenue-draining application performance issues could be prevented with an application performance management solution,” said Charley Rich, vice president of marketing and product management at Nastel. “These applications are designed to handle thousands of transactions, but there will be times when something goes awry and retailers and businesses need the visibility into the applications to remediate those issues quickly, if not prior to them occurring. APM is designed to give that visibility and proactively determine when transactions are bottlenecking and about to negatively affect business-critical applications. Having the ability to recognize and remediate any issues could be the difference between a good and bad holiday season.”

View a demonstration of Nastel AutoPilot here.

About Nastel
Nastel Technologies is a premier global provider of application performance management solutions for mission-critical applications from the datacenter to the cloud.  Some of the world’s largest enterprises put their trust in Nastel.  Nastel is a privately held company headquartered in New York, with offices in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Mexico, and a network of partners throughout Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. For more information, visit Nastel's website at www.nastel.com.  Visit our blog, follow us on twitter, become a fan on Facebook.

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