Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Once developers have implemented and stabilized applications in a production environment, the applications are placed in "maintenance mode"; thereafter, many receive little scrutiny. As time passes, business volumes grow and hardware components change. The processing efficiency of applications under maintenance can wane to a point where consumption of memory, storage, processor, and other resources becomes excessive. Whether the economy is doing well or poorly, applications professionals have the opportunity to avoid expensive server, memory, and storage upgrades by leveraging the available performance monitoring and diagnostic tools to identify, eliminate, and implement controls to prevent the recurrence of wasted application resources.