Factors that cannot be ignored in enterprise development strategy: the outstanding value of APM in cloud migration

IT departments are becoming more and more strategic in helping companies achieve their business goals. Companies are trying to use technology as a means not only to discover new opportunities and open up new markets, but also to find ways to connect with their customer base and improve customer loyalty. As most of us know, the current priority for companies is to migrate their IT infrastructure to the cloud as much as possible, and cost-effectiveness and resource elasticity are also considered to be driving factors for adopting the cloud. Another benefit of this shift is the rise of DevOps as a standard IT practice.

The adoption of DevOps (the "combination" of software development and IT operations) is almost tailor-made for companies that are migrating to the cloud. Because a large number of applications are either migrated to the cloud or developed locally, they are usually customer-facing and have varying degrees of direct impact on corporate revenue. Since the group that APP applications are facing is customers, their performance requirements are high, and the quality of service must be ensured when solving problems related to applications that need to be executed immediately. A DevOps-oriented department can promote stronger communication and collaboration between these functional teams through closer development and operations. This allows companies to deploy applications more quickly and flexibly, and reflect application problems. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) comes in.

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APM has become an absolute necessity for successfully migrating applications to the cloud and making DevOps work. The user experience of the application must be positive. Therefore, it is crucial to be able to identify, diagnose and solve performance problems in real time. APM has become the key to maintaining service levels and ensuring user satisfaction. In fact, a study conducted by ESG this year showed that 91% of companies need to improve performance management. How to use APM to successfully complete cloud migration? APM can have an impact on three areas throughout the organization: supporting DevOps, achieving continuous delivery of application versions, and establishing clear communication and feedback channels for various stakeholders in IT.

Comprehensive support for DevOps

Traditionally, development and operations teams seem to be at odds with each other. Moving to the cloud can easily exacerbate challenges between both parties when they need to face the same problems, and more importantly, they need to respect each other's challenges and expertise. Development teams need to move fast and deliver new versions and patches as quickly as possible to meet the needs of the business, and the cloud can support this development speed. On the other hand, all operations need a stable and more deliberate approach to application release cycles and corresponding support, because the behavior of applications in the cloud affects performance, cost, reliability and scalability. Deploy an APM solution to support DevOps by giving operations teams a stronger ability to quickly pinpoint performance bottlenecks and the root causes of application slowdowns or failures, and provide all the details needed to develop solutions. With APM, DevOps has the tools to quickly resolve problems and even proactively prevent problems that may adversely affect the user/customer experience.

Achieving Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery actually means that you will release updates or revisions of your application on a continuous timeline so that end users can use new features as quickly and efficiently as possible. Continuous delivery is very suitable for cloud environments due to the elastic nature of the infrastructure available for developing and deploying cloud applications. The amount of infrastructure required may vary depending on the development and deployment phases - even in large-scale situations. The application will also run as expected without affecting the end user experience. APM can respond to application problems faster to support a continuous delivery strategy, regardless of scale, immediately point out performance issues, reduce the impact of potential errors on user experience, and enable the QA (quality assurance) process to keep up with the speed of development.

Cross-functional communication and collaboration

APM is the glue that can bind an IT organization together. Likewise, if all functional roles are not aligned or based on the same performance data, migration to the cloud can be challenging. APM provides a clear view of application performance and issues throughout the development lifecycle. Application owners, business analysts, developers, and operations support teams can rely on the visualization provided by APM and the feedback loop at every stage of this process to ensure that users always have access to the latest version of the application.

In order for developers to build tested applications, they need APM to show errors, issues, and code test results and ensure that these functions are executed within the performance SLA. If a certain aspect of the application must be executed within one second, then it needs to do so. In this way, APM can help developers write optimized code.

Once in production, the operations team can use APM to ensure that the application works according to actual conditions and to ensure satisfaction of benchmarks. Performance requirements can be met and approved before starting production and user access. Then in production, APM can continuously monitor live applications to focus on problems, making it easier for operators to classify problems, understand what happened, and collect diagnostic information to help them solve problems in real time. In addition, application owners and business analysts use APM to monitor the end-user experience and see which aspects of the application provide value, quantify these interactions, and focus development on where users spend their time and obtain valuable information. Equally important, they will not involve users in order to drive product direction.

We cannot underestimate the role of APM in a successful enterprise migration to the cloud. Not only does it make IT more efficient, but it also ensures the best and most meaningful user experience.