Assign a team of IT and business stakeholders from functional areas to define business priorities and metrics and to develop (KPIs) and service level agreements (SLAs) for all applications, sites and technology tiers. This entails setting thresholds and metrics for intervention, setting up alerts and continuously monitoring the entire infrastructure from user/transaction to disk.

These tools and processes can give IT managers parameters for determining when storage or server capacity will be at risk, so that they can make adjustments quickly before response times suffer. Planning entails determining archiving priorities; unused or infrequently used applications and data should not be consuming expensive infrastructure resources. The plan should entail mapping of the most high-performing components to the applications that require top-level response. As always, balancing performance with cost and business needs is foundational, so costs are allocated according to the application's impact on revenues and customer satisfaction.

2. Create an application profile.

Understanding how applications behave and documenting that behavior into a profile helps determine the application's thresholds and when intervention is required. How an organization defines application failure in its core systems will differ, so it's critical to customize these profiles to the needs of customers, any industry or regulatory requirements and other parameters defined by the business units. Companies need monitoring solutions that keep tabs on the average response times for a particular application, including documenting the baseline performance and the application performance during its peaks and troughs.

3. Performance test and create baselines.