The diagram below shows a holistic approach to application performance. The upper part shows the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) pipeline consisting of the four components of the SDLC. Application performance needs to be considered at each phase with inputs and outputs feeding into your Organizational structure and your monitoring components. Your organization needs documented Service Level Agreements (SLA's), Performance Best Practices, Training, and CMMI process areas institutionalized into your organization. These will feed into your SDLC pipeline and help determine the requirements necessary to achieve your goals. The MECM pipeline, consisting of Monitoring, Evaluation, Control and Modeling, feeds into your Organizational I/O and SDLC to let your organization track how well your applications are performing given the attributes of those two pipelines. 
 

Application Performance is not a one time thought. The organization must constantly evaluate it's applications through out the lifecycle of the application in order to sustain the operating components of the business.

The cyclical view of the applicaton performance lifecycle may also be represented in the APM Framework©. The APM Framework© is not a closed system that has to be followed rigorously but must be tailored to the environment of the organization that uses it.