How to choose an application performance management tool? Master four basic principles

Imagine going to the doctor for a sore throat. The doctor asks you to say "ah" while pressing your tongue with a tongue depressor. By observing the condition of your throat, the doctor can confirm that your sore throat is caused by redness and swelling in your throat and choose the appropriate treatment for you. This example is very similar to traditional infrastructure monitoring tools. These tools provide a very targeted but limited view of the problem. In today's complex application and infrastructure environment, in order to effectively diagnose problems, you need to use application performance management tools to see a complete view.

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How do application performance management tools ensure a healthy application environment?

Now, let's review a real scenario that takes place in a doctor's office. When the nurse examines you, she asks about your symptoms, medical history, and any medications you're taking, and then checks your blood pressure, temperature, and pulse. But before the doctor makes a diagnosis and prescribes medication, he'll give you a more complete exam, checking not only your throat but also your breathing, heartbeat, and ears. This process is very similar to how a full-blown Application Performance Management (APM) tool works.

Good APM tools can provide performance intelligence to discover and diagnose bottlenecks in your application code, including containerized services and microservice environments. They can help you resolve issues before your users are impacted, giving you the information you need and ensuring you have a healthy application environment!

Four features to look for in your application performance management (APM) solution

How do you choose an APM solution? Riverbed's latest publication, "Introduction to Application Performance Management," discusses how to find an APM solution in today's complex application and infrastructure environment that covers all key parts of the application delivery chain. Whether you are launching new applications, centralizing application management, consolidating or virtualizing data centers, or migrating to the cloud, managing application performance requires a holistic view that includes:

◆End-user experience data

◆Application discovery, tracking and diagnosis

◆Application analysis

◆Infrastructure and network performance views

1) End-user experience monitoring - closely related to APM

End users expect to have access to the business applications they need at any time and with a consistent experience. Many APM products can provide information about the availability and performance that end users actually experience when interacting with web applications. Most enterprise environments are more complex than this. Web is just one type of application in the typical enterprise application portfolio. Whether using web applications or thick client applications, whether local users, global users or using mobile devices, you must be able to monitor and achieve the ultimate goal of application performance: the end user experience.

Analyzing end-user experience data enables application support teams to observe and analyze how users interact with applications. It enables teams to manage multi-tier applications by breaking down total application response time into contributing sources, initiating root cause troubleshooting, and analyzing traffic and response times between servers.

2) Application discovery, tracking, and diagnosis

What an end user thinks of as a single action may actually involve multiple different sub-transactions across many different application components. These can include different application servers, databases, and even completely different websites, such as those that serve ads or maps and directions. You need an APM solution that can track, monitor, and troubleshoot the performance of each critical transaction, correlate them, and gain insight into the various components of your application. It should also provide the following capabilities:

◆ Covers performance metrics for all application components such as Java, .NET, Web servers, databases, operating systems, and storage

◆Application dependency graph, providing a complete view of your application and infrastructure components and their interrelationships

◆Code-level transaction tracking and application component performance monitoring, allowing you to gain deep insight into your application to diagnose the root cause of performance issues

3) Application analysis

Gartner has updated the definition of its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring Suites and confirmed the importance of application analytics to APM. The APM Magic Quadrant now lists application analytics as one of the main functional dimensions of APM tools.

Analyzing and monitoring system and application metrics can automatically detect abnormal behavior, correlate information, discover the root cause of problems, and predict events and performance trends. This is an important function in modern complex environments. In this environment, applications change frequently, are built with microservices, are elastic, transient, and highly virtualized. APM tools use statistical analysis, machine learning, pattern recognition, or mathematical theory to automatically detect the root cause of transaction performance problems.

The dashboard can provide a big picture view of applications and infrastructure through a "unified virtual management platform" to provide actionable alerts and information to different teams.

4) Understand infrastructure and network performance

Application performance management enables application teams to monitor SLA compliance rather than simple uptime measurements. Availability is still an important SLA metric, but teams also use end-to-end responsiveness as an indicator of service level.

Although individual components in the application infrastructure may be operating within established performance thresholds, the digital experience may be slow or unresponsive. To the user, the application or website is effectively unavailable or "down." For example, transactions in a website application often rely on the efficient operation of multiple steps and components.

Any failure or delay in these steps will result in the inability to use the application. In addition, even if each of the individual steps or components performs as expected, the resulting performance may not be ideal. Therefore, APM solutions must monitor the overall digital experience so that DevOps teams can:

◆Classification

This is a comprehensive application performance management solution that provides IT with an end-to-end view of the entire application and infrastructure environment, including all transactions and components. DevOps teams can drill down into the details of the problem, quickly triage the problem, and assign the problem to the appropriate team or third-party vendor.

◆Problem solving

APM provides application teams with the tools to troubleshoot performance issues. This should start with a "big view" top-down approach that enables them to pinpoint and drill down into individual transactions and components to isolate and resolve the root cause of performance issues.

◆Application dependency diagram

Application performance management provides the ability to map an application to the application components and underlying infrastructure elements that deliver it. Understanding the application architecture enables more effective troubleshooting and helps reduce the unknown risks associated with application and infrastructure changes.

◆Manage application performance in the cloud

APM provides a unified view in a hybrid environment that includes multiple cloud services and data center applications. It integrates application knowledge from multiple perspectives such as application components, networks, servers, databases, and Web services. It should provide a holistic solution for applications rather than a simple superposition of the above parts.

◆Manage performance based on application and infrastructure changes

Application and infrastructure changes fundamentally reduce visibility and increase application complexity. To proactively address these performance issues, these change plans should include the implementation of APM.