7 Must-Haves for Application Performance Management. SlashGuide - July 2013

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1 7 Must-Haves for Application Performance Management SlashGuide - July 2013

2 7 Must-Haves for Application Performance Management 2 Picture these all-too-familiar application fails: A checkout transaction hangs. In a blink, a happy buyer sours and abandons their cart. You ve lost the sale, and perhaps the customer. Your biggest dealer keeps getting knocked off your inventory system. Suddenly, your biggest competitor is looking more attractive. An internal business application slows to a crawl Again. A major department head mutters something unprintable about IT, and dreams of happy hour. Whether they re inside or outside your company walls, today s software users have NO patience for slow, unstable, unavailable applications. As a result, many of today s businesses, jobs and customer happiness live or die on the performance of their critical software applications. Great performance drives sales, growth, good reputation and success. Bad performance... You get the idea. Unfortunately, today s applications are tougher than ever to keep running speedily and reliably. They re increasingly complex, dynamic, and distributed. That s where Application Performance Management (APM) comes in. Smartly chosen and deployed, these powerful tools help departments and organizations find and fix performance problems in critical apps, from the browser to the database, on a mobile app or in the cloud. With IT outages causing businesses $26.5 billion in lost revenue each year i, faster resolution of application problems protect your bottom line. This SlashGuide identifies key criteria to look for in choosing your APM solution. Heed them and you ll be well along the way to ensuring the fast and reliable access that today s users and businesses demand. First, Meet the Enemy: Complexity Today s critical applications come with a new level of complexity, making it difficult to monitor performance and find root causes of problems. This complexity comes about in several ways. Distributed/Service Oriented Architectures. For starters, modern application architectures are very complex and distributed. This alone makes it far harder to understand and identify the issues that impact performance. Furthermore, today s applications often rely on multiple remote web services for key functionalities, further increasing complexity and making it more difficult to identify the source of a bottleneck. Rapid Change. Deployment automation tools like Ant, Chef and others enable fast, frequent changes in production environments. This rapid rate of change makes it much more difficult to keep your application stable and fast. Here, again, interdependencies between different elements of an application means a change in any service can significantly impact the performance of the entire application.

3 7 Must-Haves for Application Performance Management 3 Lack of IT Resources. Finally, operations staff and application support teams simply do not have the time or resources to constantly troubleshoot problems with application performance doubly so with a complex mix of legacy and new components. Budgets are tight and staffs are lean. Too bad many legacy APM solutions impose manual tasks, further burdening time-stressed staffs. The Smart Seven That s the harsh reality. Now here s the hope: APM can help easily monitor, troubleshoot and fix application performance issues. But as with any software, not all APM is created equal. Here are seven key attributes you should look for in a modern APM product. 1. Ease of Use To keep pace with changing business opportunities, IT and application support staff must always be innovating. So they need an APM solution that limits precious time spent monitoring and managing existing applications. Unfortunately, many legacy APM solutions are complex and time-consuming to learn and use. Modern APM solutions should: Offer a simple, intuitive, familiar interface. This helps support staff get up to speed and respond quickly when investigating performance issues. Ease of use also helps ensure strong adoption across the application support team. Automate common tasks, such as auto-discovery of new code changes. Manually configuring your APM tool is time consuming and again diverts precious resources. Automating the task returns staff to higher-value work more quickly. Baseline performance levels. Another way to make life easier for application support teams is to make it easier to pro-actively minimize potential performance problems. Some legacy solutions require staff to manually set static thresholds for alerting and collecting data. Smart modern solutions automatically learn application performance baselines and trigger alerts only when performance deviates. Automatic Flow Mapping. Some legacy APM solutions require a portfolio of individual, hard-to-use tools. While these can deliver information about elements of an application, they don t really provide insight into overall performance. Much better is a single solution that can handle real user monitoring in a browser, providing deep visibility, insight and diagnostics. 2. Time to Deployment The faster an organization gets started with an APM product, the sooner it benefits. As noted above, few today have time to read complex documentation or take classes on getting a new APM system running. Fewer still have the resources to hire expensive consultants, which is usually what ends up happening with legacy solutions. The product should just work -- and fast.

4 7 Must-Haves for Application Performance Management 4 Here again, legacy APM falls short. Most require changes in the application code in addition to extensive configuration work. With today s dynamic, interdependent applications, that s just not practical. A modern APM product should be easy to deploy and running in 15 minutes -- with no code changes to the application needed (or) required. Why is that important? Many applications today are extremely large and growing rapidly. For example, travel service provider Orbitz has approximately 140 distributed applications consisting of 2,700 JVMs that they wanted to monitor. Deploying a legacy APM solution on this environment would take six months or more, but with a modern APM product it took only two weeks. Time to deployment is particularly critical in new markets. Among other benefits, being first to market lets a company establish its brand, set standards and position itself as a thought leader. ii 3. User Empowerment Quickly mastering a tool is key for companies seeking maximum return on their APM investment. Smart companies seek an APM solution and vendor that empower not stymie their users. The key elements here are top-notch, affordable support, easy-to-understand education and documentation. Critical for success is a top-notch support team. Does the vendor offer quick response time and high-quality engineers? Even with the best solutions, problems can arise. So it s important to look for a supplier that offers highly trained technical account managers, experienced Java/.NET developers and architects who can resolve problems quickly. Beware of companies employing low-level staff to work on support tickets. Choose an APM provider with a high Net Promoter Score (NPS). User enablement through these varied forms of support can be key to resolving problems. Does your APM provider actively help customers succeed? Does it offer field-proven best practices and tips? Does its blog contain only marketing foo-foo? Or are there case studies, usage examples, and articles focusing on technology? A provider committed to user enablement encourages customers to share information via user groups and customer summits. Does yours? 4. Scalability For most businesses, success means growth. Companies always need new customers and more revenue. That usually means offering more services and more features -- and the growth of business applications. Make sure the APM solution you choose can scale to keep pace with the growth of your applications. Ask your APM vendor (and a customer reference) about how their management servers scale will you need a new server for every 100 nodes? 200? Make sure that your APM vendor will be able to support the growth of your applications without having to split up your performance data between management servers. In addition, make sure your APM vendor will be able to support any new initiatives you have planned. For example, if you plan to migrate your applications to the cloud, make sure your APM solution will be able to support a cloud or hybrid application well.

5 7 Must-Haves for Application Performance Management 5 5. Choice of Deployment Model Many companies want to deploy the newest APM technologies without the high cost of an on-premises solution. As a result, demand is growing for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) APM. It makes sense: SaaS lowers the cost of ownership, since the vendor assumes the cost of provisioning and maintaining the infrastructure. At the same time, many companies still need on-premises solutions, which offer more control over information and management data. To accommodate all the many (and fast-changing) possibilities, look for an APM provider that can deliver its solution in multiple forms on-premises, SaaS, or a combination of both. 6. Built for Production Many legacy APM solutions were designed by developers primarily with the needs of developers in mind. These solutions offered a way to test applications, and assess the impact of changes as an application was being developed. As a result, these tools were designed to collect as much data as possible with little regard for overhead. Unfortunately, many legacy APM solutions have not really changed to fit today s high-volume production applications. Many offer the same tools retrofitted and remarketed as production ready. These tools can run in production only when significant functionalities are turned off, forcing the user to choose between visibility and performance. A truly production-ready APM solution, on the other hand, shouldn t require such a tradeoff. It should monitor everything without incurring more than 2% overhead on your production application. To that end, companies that need to monitor applications in their production environment should be careful to choose a solution built for production, not retrofitted for it. Another point to consider: Many of the legacy APM tools were designed for traditional, static production architectures, and depend on statically defined relationships. Not surprisingly, these do not work well in today s dynamic web applications and public/private cloud infrastructures, since they depend on statically defined relationships. Keeping pace with production environment changes is again critical to ensuring application availability and high performance. Want further proof? A recent Gartner study iii projected that through 2015, More than 50 percent of [outages traceable to people and processes] will be caused by change/configuration/release integration and hand-off issues." 7. Collaboration Capabilities Today s applications are complex entities. They rely on the collective effort of multiple, distributed applications working in unison. Fixing problems with these distributed applications that impact the business requires coordinated actions from multiple groups in an organization.

6 7 Must-Haves for Application Performance Management 6 As a result, a modern APM tool must enable collaboration between Operations, Development and Database Administrators, among others. Each group needs a shared tool that provides visibility for their end users. In contrast, if you use a complicated developer tool in development and a network monitoring tool in Ops and a database tool with the DBA, there will be endless finger pointing. Instead, an APM solution must offer a single pane of glass that unites Ops, Dev, QA, and Line of Business to encourage a DevOps culture and data-driven decisions. AppDynamics as Your Technology Partner AppDynamics, Inc. is an application performance management (APM) company that focuses on managing the performance and availability of applications across cloud computing environments, as well as inside the data center. AppDynamics is an APM industry leader, according to the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for application performance management. The company specializes in complex, distributed environments, supporting Java and.net applications as well as hybrid Java/.NET. AppDynamics offers a SaaS or an onpremise deployment. The AppDynamics APM solution helps companies monitor and troubleshoot application performance issues. It can be used to alert staff when something goes wrong, shows how a problem impacts end users, and gives a company a sense of the business impact of a performance problem. For more information about AppDynamics APM, visit: i ii iii