"Application Performance Management enables you to prioritize your problem list." So stated Janelle Shaw, Principal Consultant for Application Performance Management solutions at CA Wily Technology, at the 15th International SOA World Conference & Expo 2009 East held June 22-23, 2009, in New York.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers customers powerful capabilities to create dynamic service-based business processes, increasing development flexibility and reducing development cost. The downside of this flexibility is increased application distribution and management complexity.

It's important to have visibility into the system and to measure SOAs along with a business process, Shaw stated. She emphasized three points: the ability to visualize, automate, and optimize.

Prioritizing events is also important, for example, how do you know which alarms are the most important. And this, Shaw said, is where Application Performance Management comes in. It enables you to prioritize your problem list.