As I said on Monday a good APM tool will give us a
LOT of useful information about the workload in our environment. It’ll also
present the data in a way that allows various teams to talk in the same
language.
So it will help define what a user
transaction is, and where that transaction spends it’s time.
A user action = A transaction
–
Log on, Search, Add
to Basket, Checkout, Payment = 5 transactions
So what are the benefits, difficulties and issues to avoid when using APM?
Benefits
–
Common language
–
Service based
–
Defined SLAs
–
Real workload volumes
(Planning benefits)
Usual Difficulties
–
No tool capturing
this data (see my recommendation at the end of this blog)
–
No access to the data
held (Typically controlled by Operations)
–
No import facility to
capacity tool
Avoid
–
Exporting data from
both tools into Excel and manually cutting and pasting to get combined reports
This is data that is
traditionally hard to get hold of.
Either it’s simply not collected, or it’s fragmented and hidden by teams
who don’t want to lose control of “their toy”.
And quite often it’s not been designed with the intention of combining
its data with something else, like a
capacity tool.
If you get or have an APM tool running
the last thing you want to do is spend time exporting everything into excel to
combine the data. (88% of spread sheets
have errors).
My recommendation, if you haven't got an APM tool currently, is to take a look at SharePath - it monitors in real time and provides you with the real user experience(not synthetic) http://www.metron-athene.com/products/sharepath/sharepath-technology-overview.html
On Friday I'll be discussing SANs, as this seems to be the weak
point in the performance chain right now and where we can get that storage data from.
Phil Bell
Consultant
No comments:
Post a Comment