Custom Apps Make Businesses Stand Out

Companies use many applications, but not all apps are created equal. Custom applications typically are for company-specific needs—strategic business activities that are mission-critical to corporate objectives where over-the-counter applications just can’t do the job.

Many of these apps are designed by various lines of business—by sales and marketing for revenue and competitive differentiation, but also by engineering and IT for internal process and cost reasons. According to Technavio, the custom application market will grow by $38.15 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5 percent from 2021 to 2026 due to the adoption of advanced technologies and the rising need for enterprises to create custom apps for smartphones and other connected devices. And according to F5’s “2022 State of Application Strategy Report,” most organizations manage between 200 and 1,000 custom applications that may include nearly two dozen different application security and delivery technologies and several third-party as-a-service offerings. Finding the App in the Haystack

Why is it challenging to keep custom apps running?

For starters, IT operations (ITOps) teams typically do not have ownership of business applications, even if they do share the responsibility for keeping the applications running and ensuring service level agreements (SLAs) for them. A custom application could be from a business unit, a special project, or a particular developer who is no longer with the company. Discovery of undefined business applications is extremely difficult for a variety of reasons, including the number of applications an enterprise is running, different business unit owners, various geolocation development centers, and poor documentation or out-of-date customer management databases (CMDBs).

Monitoring custom applications also is difficult—often impossible—for many performance-monitoring tools that lack in-depth visibility. In other cases, monitoring custom applications requires manual configuration that can be very time-consuming. When a company has lots of these apps in use, the manual effort to configure specific monitoring for them can mean significant person-hours. When the custom applications are implemented by lines of business, IT may learn of their existence only when those applications are on the network already, possibly experiencing issues. Many tools lack granular performance details, and due to a lack of communications between lines of business and network operations, targeted monitoring may never be implemented, thus missing some important applications.

Automating Support for Custom Apps

What’s the solution?

Visibility. And with that visibility, the ability to recognize custom applications and continually measure them for key performance indicators (KPIs) that are essential to assuring service quality. Together, NETSCOUT and F5 have that solution. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE provides deep packet inspection at scale, which delivers visibility and analysis into any infrastructure environment, including data centers, private and public cloud, and co-location facilities, for any customer-facing applications—voice, video, software as a service (SaaS), and unified communications as a service (UCaaS)—regardless of where they are accessed. F5, a leader in the enterprise load balancer and application delivery controller market, enables user-controlled custom business applications to be imported directly from F5 BIG-IP server pool definitions to be used in the nGeniusONE solution for identifying and monitoring these critical applications. With the integration of NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE and F5’s BIG-IP, identifying and configuring support for custom applications is more automated and streamlined, helping customers eliminate blind spots at the packet level for better application performance and security assurance.

As business continues to introduce more custom applications for competitive differentiation, the ability to discover, configure, and monitor these applications efficiently and securely is paramount.
 
Learn more about the NETSCOUT and F5 customer app solution.