A good Application Performance Management(APM)
tool will give you a LOT of useful information about the workload in your
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)
Also don't
forget to register for Dale's 'Performance Management made easy webinar, which examines
the problems solved by application performance management (APM) tools, shows how
efforts to monitor and troubleshoot complex applications without good
visibility can be very tedious and time consuming, and describes different
methods that APM tools use to obtain data and compares and contrasts the
different approaches.
Phil Bell
Consultant
