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Author: David Wagner

  • APM: Helping Overcome Custom App Management Woes

    APM: Helping Overcome Custom App Management Woes

    In any economic climate, every business deploying custom apps needs to assess their APM needs to protect their business

    There are numerous use cases for custom-made apps, but only one reason they’re deployed: Something off-the-shelf just won’t cut it.

    When we launch a new kind of digital business, or if operations are far too complex for an existing commercial application, we need at least one custom app. No matter the business model—whether it’s a startup food delivery service, online shopping app or an app designed to manage a complex enterprise supply chain, we need custom apps. And this need is only accelerating over time, with the growth in deployment of custom apps exploding.

    But managing custom apps comes with complications, even before the pandemic exacerbated those complications. Custom apps are written on top of the latest architectures. In the past, app code was monolithic, of a single piece. Modern apps are built from services linked together dynamically—a series of small interlocking parts—and each of those parts is responsible for far less than previous monolithic apps.

    As opposed to the simple one-to-one relationships between applications and infrastructure, modern applications and their supporting environments present layered and nuanced arrangements from an interaction perspective.

    Modern applications (and their supporting infrastructure) never stop being dynamic. Services continuously change and are reconfigured. They are moved around and redeployed like so many LEGO pieces under robotic control. Eventually, these operations add up to hundreds or thousands or even millions of separately executable code elements. And to be clear, the custom app continues to evolve long after it’s left production. It’s an everlasting rollout.

    It’s great when it works—quick to value, easy to build and deploy. But it can be terrifying when something goes wrong because of the increased complexity, heterogeneity and dynamism. And the entire operation must be managed—by you, while you work from home.

    2 Scenarios Brought on by COVID-19

    Custom applications generally must be highly available. They must provide an engaging user experience, which translates into end-to-end application performance—even when demand is unpredictable. The negative consequences of bad performance include lost revenue, market share, customers and degradations in the company’s market reputation.

    Multiple new scenarios are occurring as a result of the COVID-19 era.

    Here are the salient two:

    COVID-19 Accelerates Unpredictable Demand

    From a performance standpoint, the biggest challenge right now is unpredictable demand. Unpredictable demand for transactional work from applications causes bottlenecks. Bottlenecks, in turn, bring about slowdowns or outages.

    Add to that, some apps not considered business-critical before this crisis are now far more important than even a few months ago. Creators of software designed to help businesses carry on—such as video conferencing software—are experiencing high demand. While it’s good to experience success, it’s also chaotic when the spike is unexpected.

    Unpredictable demand leads to slowdowns. It’s not easy to gather the team together and figure out why customers are reporting, “your website is slow,” or “some things aren’t working.” Your remote web application support team (which might be your e-commerce support team for a revenue-generating site) has no idea how to start solving these problems based on general descriptions of the issues.

    Meanwhile, other apps that were once in demand, such as travel sites, are nearly idle. The staff at these companies are likely creating busywork, wondering how long this new paradigm will last. Eventually, someone will need to cut costs.

    COVID-19 Makes You Cut Costs

    The worldwide economy has taken a massive hit. I’ve been around long enough to see this trend three times: When the economy flops, companies slash costs—and they tend to do it with an ax, not a scalpel.

    If you have a travel site, demand is down. How can you tell where to cut costs? How can you identify exactly how much infrastructure resource is needed to support decreased demand? And can you safely dial back subscriptions for cloud resources such as Amazon or Azure?

    Manage the Crisis With APM

    To manage during these times, you must measure what you must manage. You need application performance management (APM), a class of monitoring focused on the performance of the application itself, the users of the application and the complete infrastructure stack supporting the application.

    APM Monitors for the Unpredictable

    APM focuses on application availability (is it up), performance (response time and latency), throughput (calls per second or transactions per second) and the error rates of the application’s transactions. It does so fully cognizant of all supporting infrastructure, whether on-premises, hybrid or full-on public cloud.

    If your site is “running slowly,” you can use APM to discover if the problem is affecting everyone all over the world or only in specific geographies.

    APM’s synthetic transaction checking allows you to look at the transactional performance and availability of your web applications from the perspective of web application users. APM’s code profiling and transaction tracing allow complete visibility into the performance of all the elements of the application itself, the services of which it is comprised and how they interrelate to compete for underlying infrastructure resources. Finally, APM’s log management enables marrying events and issues related to applications and infrastructure to the end-to-end application performance picture. Together, this provides a comprehensive picture of performance and availability—from the end user all the way down through all elements of the infrastructure, the application and service, down to a specific line of code.

    Stay Cost-Effective With APM

    APM shouldn’t be expensive to procure and maintain. It shouldn’t consume valuable developer resources to implement and maintain in production.

    First-generation APM tools were pricey and difficult to use, mandating specific application developer expertise and involvement during application development. Thus, companies reserved APM only for apps important for reducing management complexity and the risk and costs associated with poor availability or performance. Luckily for business, most of those high-priced vendors have transitioned to modern architectures and are now pure-play SaaS.

    Next-generation APM isn’t difficult. Nor is it necessarily expensive. It also protects revenue by protecting and enhancing the online business results of the company—including online revenue, customer satisfaction, market share and company reputation.

    If you have a CI/CD process through which you’re always pushing new releases into production, the APM tool should be able to help. It should be able to automatically adapt to new releases as they’re deployed, without requiring any manual reconfiguration. If you’re using either a canary or a blue/green deployment process, the APM tool should also provide you the crucial information you need to decide whether to proceed with each release (or roll it back).

    And if demand is down for your site, APM can identify precisely how much infrastructure resources are needed to support your decreased demand, allowing you to safely de-provision and save money by dialing back subscriptions for cloud resources at Amazon or Azure. APM leads to savings.

    Getting Started With APM

    Before deploying APM, inventory all your apps. In my experience, companies often break down their apps into two or perhaps three tiers.

    For tier-one apps, money is no object. They must instrument the application because it’s their business. If you are a financial site where 85% of your revenue is associated with your online retirement information system, it’s mission-critical. You’re going to instrument every aspect of that application. You have no choice.

    Meanwhile, tier-two apps may have become critical because of the crisis. Or, those apps have not been instrumented because of APM’s reputation for cost and complexity. Now that its threshold of complexity—and costs—have been significantly lowered, it’s time to instrument those apps.

    There may be a whole new class of risks to your business model because of COVID, which makes today an excellent time to reassess what’s newly important to your business and what’s not.

    We’re at an inflection point, and every business deploying custom apps needs to assess their APM needs to protect their business, whether they’ve been adversely or positively affected by this crisis. It’s time to instrument your apps and stop running blind.

  • 5 Business Insights to Gain From APM

    5 Business Insights to Gain From APM

    My son is a commercial on-demand cargo pilot, and it’s his job to move around auto parts when they’re needed in the supply chain. During a recent auto strike, he ended up flying a few fenders to a factory for something around $20,000. The profit margin on those fenders was blown to bits, but it would have been far more expensive to interrupt the supply chain — auto assembly lines burn millions per hour.

    That kind of individual, transactional economics is insane, of course — no actual fender really costs so much. My point is inefficiencies occur when there’s a hiccup somewhere. They can happen at any point — including when the custom applications that work with suppliers aren’t functioning correctly. The result? The item isn’t ordered, or delivered, on time. And there’s a substantial financial impact downstream.

    That’s why slow is the new down. The stakes are high. Here’s five reasons why you need a comprehensive performance management strategy to track and measure all digital touchpoints in your business and mitigate the impact to both your business and the user.

    Timing Is Everything

    Not too long ago, business ran on an analog model. Customers went to the retailer or contacted them in some way and placed an order. It was the same in B2B interactions; parts were ordered and, once in stock, they were delivered.

    The old system worked fine, but compared with the way things are today, that analog model was inefficient. It required more warehousing. Delivery took more time. Overhead was higher. Nothing was “Just in time.” You could call it, “Just you wait.”

    Now we’re interconnected, often by custom apps and websites (custom, because each company is different, with different needs that can’t be fulfilled by some “one-size-fits-all” app or site). It works well when it’s working well. But when there’s even a blip, there’s disaster. 

    Our modern, digitally interconnected system is kept running smoothly by monitoring. Everything about the app and the site is monitored and measured, to a microscopic degree. How is the mobile app performing? How long did the customer stay on a page? How quickly did the B2B app answer a parts order? You can find that out — and fix the problem before it grows.

    This is called application performance monitoring (APM). The digital world is full of acronyms, but “APM” is a vital one to know because measurement is now table stakes for any digital business, whether it’s retail, financial or B2B.

    Customers Are Fast to Leave When You Are Slow

    For execs, it’s job number one to protect and increase market share. Salesforce said 52% of holiday shopping occurs on a mobile device. Last year, Google changed its algorithm to make site speed a ranking factor in mobile search. In short: Go slow, and you won’t get found. You won’t make the sale. You lose market share.

    If your customers do manage to find you: A recent study found 95% of consumers in the U.S. and U.K. will jump off an e-commerce or brand site if they’re having a frustrating time. Therefore, you need to know where and when they jump. You can find out with APM.

    If your customers are loyal, 60% will still leave you to find that product somewhere else. Customers will simply leave any digital touchpoint that doesn’t keep up. How fast is slow? Google said a mobile site should load within three seconds. Take longer than five seconds, and the probability of bounce increases by 90%.

    Customers are fast to leave when you are slow. APM gives you continuous visibility into how your application is performing and helps answer the lingering question, “Is my app good?”

    Faster Isn’t Necessarily Better

    When cloud first debuted, business leaders loved it. They were able to disconnect from messy interactions with on-premises equipment and the tech pros who maintained it. It was elastic, scalable and agile; they could expediently deploy more resources if something slowed down in the cloud.

    At least that was the plan, but the trouble is it didn’t automatically guarantee a better customer experience. It also didn’t make those auto parts arrive on time. Don’t get me wrong, Cargo Dogs love it when you urgently need them to deliver parts. But flying fenders around at the last minute is not a sign things are going well at the part vendor or at the plant.

    You still need proactive visibility. With continuous monitoring, you can understand the performance of the application and the infrastructure it runs on.

    You can stop reacting and start delivering. APM tells you where you’re getting value and where you aren’t. It knows when you’re spending too much on a feature and not getting much ROI. The secret isn’t spending more money than the other guys. It’s spending it more wisely than they do.

    I’m not going to claim APM is a digital shaman. But it does give you a perspective of the cost of running your applications and the performance of running those applications — and it does this proactively.

    An example: Earlier in my career, I worked with a business leader who had the application business for a large financial services company. This leader was tasked with ensuring digital interactions were operating in a high-performance fashion. Before he implemented APM tools, he ran with the most expensive systems and infrastructure — both on-premises and in the cloud — on the presumption that massively over-provisioning infrastructure was the safe thing to do.

    But users complained his pricey infrastructure was slow or unavailable. His IT staff would look at all their technology metrics — not in the context of application performance, just pure technology metrics — and say nothing was wrong; the infrastructure itself was performing flawlessly. Finally, he brought in APM and instrumented it on a key application and immediately got proactive visibility. He was able to fix the problems with his applications — without buying still more infrastructure.

    The Importance of Visibility

    Visibility means fewer problems that lead to slowness or outages. But if you do have interruptions, end-to-end visibility shows you the linkage between the application and the infrastructure. Your technology teams can rapidly do root-cause analysis and fix the problem much faster because they’re no longer guessing at where the issues might be.

    It means IT isn’t wasting time pointing fingers. It is working off a consistent and standard set of information. Additionally, for traditional IT organizations, APM gives next-level visibility into infrastructure, whether it’s on-premises, cloud, hybrid, etc. It gives stakeholders a view into the metrics that matter.

    The Right Metrics — Even During App Development 

    There are many reasons why applications can’t perform well. They could have other applications contending for resources. And here’s something else: that custom application could be poorly written.

    APM is a great help in the development stage of applications because it allows people writing the applications to understand how their application code is performing immediately. That way, they can optimize their code before it goes live.

    That app can be written in any number of languages, and it might be public cloud, hybrid cloud, or private, on-premises. APM instruments these apps and allows you to see right down to the line of code how those apps are performing. The likelihood of deploying poorly performing code into production thus minimized greatly.

    Conclusion

    APM allows companies to roll out better performing applications more quickly with a high degree of assurance that they’re not going to be slow in production. Without APM, you have an unknown level of risk associated with availability and performance of your applications, their transactions and your infrastructure. If you’re not monitoring it and measuring it, you can’t manage it in a low-risk fashion — which is ultimately why APM matters and should be adopted as broadly as possible across your application and infrastructure environment.

  • Overcoming Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management Challenges with APM

    Overcoming Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management Challenges with APM

    When companies move toward hybrid and multi-cloud, both leadership and IT can struggle to adapt their organizational structures and processes to a new, more complex way of doing things.

    With the classic form of DevOps, for example, operational monitoring and management procedures are radically new and different: from a management perspective, it almost appears as a free-for-all, making assessment and accountability to the business difficult to achieve on a regular, ongoing basis.

    The older system was straightforward: on-premises monitoring and management teams were organized around a technology stack, with associated monitoring and management tooling. The network, server and storage teams each had distinct processes. Different problems were escalated and triaged (Level One, Level Two, Level Three). It was formulaic—perhaps even annoying to some tech pros—but it worked.

    DevOps is different. Applications are changed, tested and deployed in production continuously, often on an hourly basis (or more frequently). It’s revolutionary because it delivers maximum business market agility, embraces technical and business evolution, and is never-ending. It radically redefines the concepts and approaches we associate with application and infrastructure support and triage processes.

    But there’s good news: Application performance solutions and workarounds are coalescing. Here’s a few ways we’re seeing teams evolve to overcome the challenge of hybrid and multi-cloud application and infrastructure management.

    Try a Monitoring Engineer

    Right now, we’re all experimenting—we’re in a digital Wild West. In that spirit, forward-looking outfits are working with the concept of a monitoring engineer (sometimes monitoring support), someone who owns the monitoring of everything important in the context of an application or a line of business.

    “Monitoring engineer” as a job title can mean many things. If you Google it you’ll find open positions for many kinds of these engineers. But for our purposes, it’s a stand-in for a new concept, a new way of thinking. To be clear, this isn’t a network monitoring engineer, or any other kind of job with the title of engineer. It’s a new way to better and more proactively align IT with the business goals of the company paying the bills.

    Traditionally, metrics have been aligned to the application or applications being built out—not the business itself. More importantly, these metrics aligned around answering questions like, “Is this specific element of infrastructure or application available and performing?” Especially at the infrastructure level, performance was defined typically as a technology resource utilization metric (i.e., how efficiently are technology resources being consumed). This new concept of monitoring engineer is designed to allow management to quickly get the answers it needs in a consolidated and focused fashion—to move, in effect, from resource-centric monitoring to service and application-centric monitoring.

    Application performance monitoring (APM) has evolved thanks to measurement focused on application availability and performance rather than infrastructure. APM requires a certain amount of applications knowledge. The monitoring engineer needs to know enough about the application environment, how the application is configured and how it’s deployed operationally but doesn’t have to be the expert in the application code itself.

    Importantly, a successful monitoring engineer requires time and focus—and management needs to set up a structure to support it. Any competent system administrator or network engineer who’s worked in a complex private cloud or on-prem hybrid environment would have the skills to do this. But these engineers need time and the ability to focus on their job, while adding APM skills to their repertoire.

    Creating Metrics That Matter

    Along with the dedicated monitoring engineer who’s minding the technology store for management, processes and languages must be standardized.

    Think back to when virtualization swept the tech pro world, some 10 or 15 years ago. We had to change and adjust. We have to do it again.

    We should start by standardizing the application languages tech pros use. How we choose languages should always be business-driven: Different languages are good at different things, which should be the deciding factor. The number of languages should also be limited, so management can be more straightforward. Similarly, standardization should be the default wherever possible to approaches considered for automated deployment and dynamic configuration management of both applications and infrastructure resources.

    Keeping things as simple as possible doesn’t mean not learning new things, however. Management will need to cultivate a culture of curiosity. Tech pros must learn new ways of working—if they don’t, the transfer to hybrid and multi-cloud will be a guaranteed slog, or worse.

    If the tech pros stay curious, they’ll stay ahead. The APM market is growing at a considerable rate, and the people with the curiosity to get involved in it are the ones who will succeed.

    APM gives tech pros a powerful tool they can easily add to their skillset by which they can then generate the data and the metrics in the language of the business. When metrics are business focused, they matter.

    The measurements the business (and customers) care about are fundamentally limited to four key metrics, in two classes:

    • Application performance—how much business work is being accomplished over time, along with the response-time experience of users.
    • Availability management—whether all resources associated with the entire technology stack are continuously up and available to service the applications, along with any and all associated errors.

    Taking this approach to measurement is about meeting the company needs in business terms, not IT. This approach is critical for ensuring excellent customer experience or an ability to immediately and cost-effectively respond to peaks in business demand. This approach answers the questions: What are users experiencing? How are specific pages and transactions performing? APM can also discover what infrastructure components are needed to support those applications delivering successful service.

    Answers like these can’t be discovered with infrastructure monitoring alone, nor with infrastructure-centric monitoring of application performance that infers performance from technology resource utilization rates. Nor can they be answered with network monitoring or storage monitoring. Only APM provides the answers the business needs. It’s the glue to bind together the different silos.

    Measurement Matters Most on a Thin Margin

    We’re in a new environment. In many ways, it’s the Wild West and there are many ways to win and lose. Few things seem absolutely right, except this: Tech pros need to be completely aligned with the businesses they work for.

    In the past, a strategy such as APM was perhaps better aligned with industry verticals. Companies operating with thin business margins were reluctant to measure. Now, it’s the opposite. Companies such as those in the e-commerce, B2B, B to high volume and B2C spaces continue to operate on thin margins and are now in a virtuous spiral. Their success depends on efficiency—and efficiency is key to making them win in the increasingly competitive marketplace.

    To achieve this level of success, companies must measure and assess where they’ve been and where they’re going. They need to do more than just keep up with the competition, they need to accept innovative processes such as DevOps, while continuously measuring their progress.

    Ultimately, speaking in the language of business can take many IT professionals outside their comfort zones. But APM gives the wary tech pros a powerful tool for generating the kinds of data and metrics management needs. APM grounds the business, but also makes sense of the new hybrid and multi-cloud environment. It’s a chance for management and IT to bridge the gap between us and them. It’s the best way to manage the changes to come.

  • Cloud Confessions: Full Stack APM Is a Necessity

    Cloud Confessions: Full Stack APM Is a Necessity

    IT environments have become more dynamic and complex, which has created the need for robust monitoring tools. As a result, companies are increasingly adopting more than one platform, catapulting us into the multi-cloud era. Technology professionals are also embracing and acknowledging the need for comprehensive, full-stack application monitoring and management, bringing application performance management (APM) into the mainstream.

    The recent SolarWinds survey Cloud Confessions 2020 reveals even though APM has become mainstream (with a majority of tech pros using APM tools regularly), there’s still work to be done to move beyond troubleshooting. This finding is consistent with last year’s study, in which nearly half of the respondents said troubleshooting was a top-three task they managed daily.

    Tech pros have an opportunity to fully leverage the benefits of APM across the entire application stack, not just for troubleshooting. They should enable tech pros at any stage in their APM journey to realize the value and richness of end-to-end optimization with APM.

    In 2020, implementing solutions to achieve integrated application performance and availability management for any type of organization will become increasingly important.

    The Cloud Confessions survey showcases how application owners, developers and support teams currently use APM tools. It also shows areas where tech pros feel they need more education and support to confidently utilize APM solutions.

    Cloud Confessions Key Findings

    This survey explores how extensively technology professionals are using APM tools, whether on-premises or for SaaS-based application management and how they monitor these environments. It also showcases areas where tech pros feel confident in their APM tools and strategies, as well as challenges and avenues for building confidence.

    The key findings show:

    1. Tech pros are using APM tools, employing a nearly even mix of SaaS and on-premises to support the three architectures most often found in modern environments. Despite this, confusion around which tools are ideal for specific IT environments is consistent across application owners, developers and support team roles.

    • Nearly nine in 10 tech professionals are using APM tools in their environments.
      • 59% are using APM for monolithic (traditional on-prem) app development architectures.
      • 40% are using APM for N-tier service-oriented architectures.
      • 39% are using APM for microservices.
    • The top three most commonly deployed tools in support of APM strategies are:
      • Database monitoring (64%).
      • Application monitoring (63%).
      • Infrastructure monitoring (61%).
    • Two-fifths of tech pros face challenges due to lack of awareness of what APM solutions are currently offered and confusion over which currently offered APM solutions are best for their needs (respectively).

    2. Overall, tech pros are confident in their ability to manage and monitor applications on-prem, in hybrid environments and in the cloud; this confidence mostly sits within their ability to troubleshoot.

    • Over eight in 10 (84%) respondents are confident in their ability to successfully manage application and infrastructure performance.
    • Two-fifths (40%) of tech pros surveyed are most confident troubleshooting application issues and monitoring application availability and performance (respectively) given their existing skillset, followed by one-third (32%) of tech pros confident in collaborating with team members.
      • Troubleshooting and monitoring as the top two areas where tech pros have the most confidence is consistent with last year’s findings—in 2019, troubleshooting app issues was the number one activity tech pros spent their time on, with 48% of respondents choosing this as a top three task.

    3. The largest challenges tech pros face when monitoring and managing application and infrastructure performance relate to an existing knowledge and skills gap. As a result, tech pros have continued to deal with the troubles of troubleshooting, despite nearly all using some type of APM tool in the last 12 months.

    • When ranking the challenges, tech pros said:
      • Lack of training for personnel was the top challenge (57%), followed by lack of awareness of what APM solutions are currently offered (44%) and confusion over which currently-offered APM solutions are best for our needs (42%).
      • All other challenges were at, or under, the 30% rate.
    • Nearly eight in 10 (78%) tech pros report spending less than 10% of their time proactively optimizing their environments (vs. reactively maintaining).
      • In 2019, 77% of respondents reported spending the same amount of time on proactive optimization.

    4. Tech pros value the business insights delivered from APM tools, but greater skills development is needed in establishing KPIs and communicating IT performance to the business.

    • The top three business insights tech pros gain from APM tools include:
      • Ability to prevent applications outages (73%).
      • Ability to prevent app slowdown related to performance and/or capacity (63%).
      • Ability to improve user/customer experience (62%).
    • Tech pros are collecting these business metrics, but there’s a need to bridge the gap between business metrics collected and tech pros’ confidence in their ability to communicate performance to the business.
      • 34% of tech pros feel they need to improve their current skillset/ability to track impact across key business metrics to more confidently manage their organization’s IT environment, followed by 30% of tech pros who feel they need to improve their current skillset/ability to troubleshoot application issues, improve the performance of application code (29%) and manage/ensure/improve end-user performance (29%) (respectively).

    The key findings uncover the importance of knowing which combination of APM elements are right for your environment. Today’s environments are highly complex and distributed, involving microservices, N-tier, monolithic and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications. This means the potential benefits of APM are even greater in modern contexts, as long as tech pros take time to educate themselves on the right tools for their environments.

    While APM tool usage is widespread, it’s not nearly as effective as it could be—an important distinction to business leaders in charge of digital transformation efforts. When we understand the APM world beyond troubleshooting, the possibilities for application performance optimization open up across the stack and across previously siloed teams.

    APM, when used to its potential, can be the great unifier of tech pro teams all working toward the goal of having highly available, well-performing applications and it can change the way modern businesses operate in the age of performance.

    — David Wagner

  • Four Ways to Modernize Processes and Measure Performance With APM

    Four Ways to Modernize Processes and Measure Performance With APM

    Change is everywhere and the stakes are high. For 2019, businesses are on track to spend over a trillion dollars on digital modernization, according to a recent study from IDC.

    A crucial part of modernization is the growing number of IT organizations using the latest in dynamic, cloud-scale technologies to develop applications. As a result, technology professionals in the businesses you serve must now work with a much more complex and dynamically changing tech stack.

    When building and maintaining an app, it’s becoming even more common to have hundreds (or thousands) of pieces of code in containers being continually reconfigured and brought in and out of production. And many of these operations take place in customer-facing applications.

    The stakes are high, because if something goes wrong operations could halt. It’s therefore vital to understand the underlying technologies throughout an organization’s IT environment to better equip customers with the tools needed to be successful. Application performance management (APM) tools that simplify stack management, whether it’s on-premises, hybrid or fully cloud-native, provide a level of visibility needed for modern businesses—and they work across multiple cloud environments, such as AWS or Azure.

    As a channel partner, you need to be prepared to help your businesses and their customers through this modernization process. 

    Try the following to help your customers modernize business processes.

    Help Them Realize Software Is Now Business-Critical

    As IT departments move from on-prem infrastructure and a mix of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and monolithic custom applications to increasingly adopted cloud-based Kubernetes microservices applications, they’re accelerating the adoption of software at the core of all their business processes. The result? Business is increasingly dynamic and responsive—new applications are built and delivered to market faster than ever. But companies are also at risk now when things don’t go well—that strategic app could degrade or fail.

    All the tech layers underpinning these applications are also becoming more sophisticated, dynamic and interwoven—and making it still harder to administer as they continuously change at an even faster rate.

    Focus Your Customers on Core Competency

    There are plenty of open-source tools out there for your customers to use to build their own monitoring. The biggest obstacle for businesses rolling out their own apps while using an open-source tool is core competency. 

    If, for example, your customer is a wholesale plumbing supply company, is their competency sourcing plumbing supplies or knowing how to write instrumentation code for all their plumbing supply chain applications? Help them focus on what they’re good at and give them tools to manage the rest.

    Perhaps you have a large financial services customer who is spending tens of millions, across multiple years, on a team of outsourced experts to write precisely the code required. This is an extremely time-consuming and costly effort, but financial institutions do this because their needs are highly specific and mission-critical, and the cost of not doing it is even higher. 

    If you look at real-time high-frequency trading environments—where billions of dollars are moved in matters of tenths of a second—you come to understand the stakes justifying these herculean efforts. All of which supports the need for APM tools to help empower the tech pros in-house who monitor and manage these high-speed trading environments.

    At the other end of the spectrum are the small tech companies with a new idea they’re out to promote. But when it comes to most companies, their core competency is often not monitoring and managing their infrastructure and applications. It’s understanding the market requirements for their custom apps and getting those apps to market quickly. At the same time, organizations of all shapes and sizes are still confronting the reality that to successfully deliver modern applications we must shift from pure infrastructure performance metrics to the KPIs that best demonstrate end-user experience.

    Ultimately, many of the organizations described above have either focused on IT as a core competency or, in the absence of dedicated tech teams (at SMBs, in particular), they have outsourced management of their complex, dynamic tech stack and custom application builds. In both instances, APM tools are a necessity and it’s prime time for the channel to deliver those services.

    Be the Most Viable Modernization Partner

    By understanding the needs of modern organizations as they grapple with their complex tech stacks, you can ensure you have the right set of tools for your customers. 

    Provide full-stack capabilities for today’s businesses to manage their applications and keep operations running smoothly. Cater to unique business problems and equip your customers with APM tools based on their needs—advanced logging, trace metrics, performance optimization and full-stack visibility across applications and the compute infrastructure on-premises, hybrid and cloud. Help them check all their functional boxes.  

    Measure Performance with Full-Stack APM

    In all cases, your customers should be measuring performance. Because every company uses a mixture of digital technologies, arming them with full-stack APM will help gain visibility into performance throughout the business. With APM, businesses can see if their system is degrading—and fix it before disaster strikes. That’s the business value for APM—it gives visibility into the complexity underpinning today’s application environments. Full-stack APM provides this visibility, whether the apps are cloud-based, on-premises or hybrid.

    But here’s the reality—not all APM tools are the same. Traditional APM solutions weren’t built for the environment IT departments now have, with the addition of containers and microservices-based applications to their existing monolithic and n-tier/SOA applications. Those solutions were made to manage hundreds or thousands of objects with slower rates of change, not the tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands to millions of objects IT works with today.

    Also, note the ephemeralness of container-based microservice applications able to live and die in a matter of seconds or less. There’s no time to automatically install a traditional agent, let alone do so manually. The container’s life span is shorter than the time it would take to do such instrumentation. Direct them instead toward a full-stack APM solution with complete coverage of all application architectures: monolithic, n-tier/SOA and microservices based. With anything less, they’re running at a higher risk of brand damage and revenue impact.

    By being the experts on APM, providing full-stack visibility and measuring performance, your customers will find modernization success.

    — David Wagner

  • APM for All: Simplifying the Complexity of Cloud

    APM for All: Simplifying the Complexity of Cloud

    As companies adopt hybrid and even multi-cloud strategies, their IT departments are beginning to use dynamic technologies to build new application features on top of existing back-end business systems. Most organizations now have a blended, multi-cloud architecture where public clouds are integrated with the existing on-premises, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure and applications.

    This means, for all the agility, flexibility and scalability the cloud affords us daily, the cloud is also a source of increased complexity for technology professionals required to assure the availability and performance of the application environment. This, in turn, is expected to have a substantial impact on overall management. Gartner predicts that by 2020, “75% of enterprises will experience visible business disruptions due to infrastructure and operations (I&O) skills gaps.”

    It’s vital, then, to first understand the underlying technologies supporting application availability and performance throughout your entire IT environment. Next, you must understand how your technologies are dynamically interacting with each other in both development and production. And you need to know this not just at the various levels of the application stack itself—across all infrastructure as well as services, function calls and code—but for various types of applications themselves: monolithic, service-oriented architectures (SOA) and microservices-based.

    That’s why, whether on-prem, hybrid or cloud-native—and whether you’re running AWS, Azure or Google Cloud (IaaS or PaaS)—you need comprehensive visibility into your complete infrastructure and application stack. Application performance management (APM) gives you this visibility into your IT environment by simplifying, and more importantly, normalizing, app stack management. 

    The Case For APM

    APM has significant business value. In today’s environments, an IT team typically no longer has only one application per virtual machine—but rather dozens of virtual machines per physical host (whether on-premises, private or public cloud), with hundreds or thousands of containerized microservices per virtual machine. Additionally, these business environments with hundreds (or many thousands) of containers are continually being reconfigured and brought in and out of production underneath customer-facing applications. If something goes wrong, the digital operations can collapse. And they all need to play nice together since the underlying resources are shared.

    At the same time, the game has changed. The red, yellow and green glow of infrastructure dashboards now has less bearing on whether you’re really delivering high-quality user experiences. Instead, success metrics are now based on evolving real-world, end-user experiences. You are customer-facing, because clients interact with you through your applications and websites. If your site is slow, you lose money and it negatively impacts the business brand.

    To fix the problem, you need specifics. For example, is the transactional performance slow because you don’t have enough compute? Or is it slow because the application code is bad? These factors are interrelated. In our dynamic, shared-and-virtualized everything environments, it’s challenging to understand where the true causes of your problems are.

    When Amazon went down for an hour during Prime Day last year, experts estimated the company lost 100 million dollars in sales. Imagine the impact of a potential outage during the holiday season. Of course, those are Amazon-sized numbers. But scale down those Godzilla figures to your size, and it still hurts—either through lost revenue or damaged brand reputation.

    With APM, you can see all the metrics and find out how the application’s performing over time. You can see it degrade, giving you time to figure out why it’s slowing—before it stopped getting you your raw materials on time. You can understand down to the line of code, or database query, exactly what, where and why it’s slow.

    But what are we talking about when we talk about APM? Gartner has pointed out the historical confusion on terms. There’s also a matter of differing capabilities among APM tools. Some are geared toward monolithic applications; others for Java and the web (and other applications) and still more are tuned for microservices. Beyond that, there are full-stack APM solutions that can measure it all.  

    Normalizing IT Management With APM

    APM strategies and toolsets aren’t all the same. By my count, there are three iterations of APM implementations. First, there’s APM dating from when all tech was monolithic, of which the best example is the old CA Wily Introscope. Then came a second generation, which covered areas such as SOA, Java and the web—a good example here would be AppDynamics and the old Dynatrace. After that comes a version of APM tuned specifically for microservices and containerized application environments, such as the new Dynatrace and Instana.

    In some cases, the actual APM technologies themselves haven’t kept up to date with the underlying infrastructure changes. That’s especially true for microservices. There are some legacy APM solutions that don’t support microservices in containerized application environments. On the flip side, some new companies in the APM space only operate in the microservices space. They are container-based, and don’t support old monolithic code. They also don’t support n–tier/SOA application environments.

    Most customers, however, have mixed environments. Almost no one is operating with 100% microservices in containers operationally managed by Kubernetes.

    By my reckoning, modern APM systems should monitor it all, because everything is mixed and likely to stay that way, if history is any indication. Companies still rely upon massive databases of proprietary information—databases of business records. They’re just building all-new applications in front of them.

    If you posit that it’s now more important than ever to ensure availability and performance as experienced by the user, then you need APM across all those three categories of applications and their environments, including public cloud providers such as AWS and Azure. You need full-stack APM.

    Getting Started

    Before you do anything else, first remember your due diligence. Ask around and seek out first-hand knowledge about the APM solution vendor. Don’t just trust them to give you objective advice on how good they are; there’s a great deal of hype in the APM market that can often cloud our understanding of a certain solution’s actual function. So, where do you start? Typically, it’s best to start your thinking as if you were the end user coming into your application and infrastructure stack. This means monitoring, measuring and understanding the real performance of your web-based or custom applications. You should start with the customer (external-facing) side and then work your way back in through the stack from a monitoring perspective. Next, monitor, measure and understand the performance metrics of the application itself. Here you’ll find critical capabilities, such as distributed transaction tracing and code profiling, to be critical to truly understand how all the application components relate from a performance perspective. Finally, while it’s essential to also know how your infrastructure components are performing, it’s critical to do so in full application performance context. This application-context infrastructure monitoring must encompass both performance instrumentation as well as all logs associated with your application and related infrastructure.

    Start small for quick success and to build a foundation from which to make APM more broadly successful for your organization. Start with one, or at a most a handful, of applications needing the greatest attention. Prove value and success and then ramp up adoption from there.

    In all cases, remember—unless you’re solely relying on serverless computing, with only microservice-based applications in containerized environments, you’ll need visibility across the three application architecture types: monolithic, SOA and microservices. Otherwise, you’re not getting all the information you need.

    It’s always been the goal of IT throughout all technology revolutions—whether it was mainframe, time-sharing, client-server or distributed, and whether it’s hybrid or full-on public cloud—to get a single pane of glass for operational management. True, full-stack APM delivers that view.

    — David Wagner

  • Predictions 2020: The Future of APM Strategies and Tools

    Predictions 2020: The Future of APM Strategies and Tools

    As 2019 comes to an end, it’s safe to say that multi-cloud strategies are here to stay. We can predict that 2020 will bring an ever-increasing demand for application performance management (APM) tools and services.

    So what does the future of APM look like? Let’s dive in.

    Multi-Cloud Strategies Increase the Demand for APM Tool Adoption

    Companies are increasingly adopting more than one platform—either for financial leverage or to create a time-to-market or feature race between the platforms. To remain competitive, public cloud providers must offer unique features or capabilities differentiating them from competitors. This has created an upsurge in new and more complex technologies, increasing the need for APM tool adoption.

    Logs Will Be Recognized as Key Aspects of APM

    APM is a puzzle made up of user experience, metrics and traces, and logs—and each piece must be incorporated to achieve full-stack visibility and ultimately seamless app performance. However, a healthy app is not characterized solely by top performance, but also availability—making a log management solution that monitors availability, enables proactivity and reacts quickly to remediate problems key.

    In 2020, implementing solutions that achieve integrated application performance and availability management for any type of organization, including those operating on-premises and/or cloud-based applications across all mixes of cloud environments, will become increasingly important and prioritized.

    APM Skills in a Cloud-First World

    The nouns have changed, but the verbs remain the same: APM skills are among the top skills tech pros want to develop in the coming year, according to the recent SolarWinds IT Pro Day survey, Building Confidence for Tech Pros of Tomorrow. However, in 2020 tech pros will begin to recognize that many of the skills they already possess are sufficient to manage the new realm of integrated solutions in the cloud. Tech pros can leverage some of the same skills they could before as the nouns have changed, but the verbs remain the same. Where we used to have server or virtual machine, now we have containers. But the verbs? They’ve always been focused on optimizing performance, ensuring availability and planning capacity.

    In 2020, the extent to which tech pros will discover they don’t need to fear new nouns (more than they did when they moved from client virtualization) will increase.

    Universal Adoption of APM Tools

    As environments become more dynamic and complex, the opportunity for applications to break increases—creating the need for robust monitoring tools. In 2020, as buyers see the benefit of leveraging APM tools on a regular basis rather than only in critical moments, the market will adjust accordingly. We can expect easier-to-implement solutions that are more highly valuable and affordable. The paradigm that APM tools have to be expensive will be broken once and for all.

    Want to learn more about what to expect in 2020? Join us Jan. 23 for our Predict 2020 Virtual Summit  featuring discussions from some of the industry’s best and brightest offering up their visions for the future. Sign up today for this free daylong virtual event.

    — David Wagner

  • Achieving Application Health Through Integrated APM

    Achieving Application Health Through Integrated APM

    Performance and availability mean everything to application users at both the enterprise and consumer level. Think about how much we rely on technology for our everyday communication—when Slack suffered from an outage this summer, it affected thousands of business professionals across the globe who use Slack to communicate, organize tasks and share information. In a sense, we are only as efficient and effective as the technology we use.

    With this in mind, it’s clear achieving and maintaining application health is paramount to overall business success. In part one of this series, we explored how creating and maintaining a healthy app involves not only ensuring it’s performing well via lifecycle APM, but also making sure it’s available when needed—making a log management solution that monitors availability, enables proactivity and reacts quickly to overcome problems is crucial.

    In order to help ensure a healthy application, we must first consider a few defining characteristics.

    Understanding a Healthy Application

    Even for humans, health is more than just being alive—if we’re not performing optimally, we’re not having the best experience possible. Optimum health for an app or website doesn’t mean it’s just up, but that it’s also performing in the way the market demands. For this, organizations need to implement an integrated APM solution to ensure top performance and continuous availability.

    However, achieving application health is easier said than done. Issues that arise for teams working in silos can lead to digital war rooms and blame storming. Organizational structure can get in the way of disparate teams working together to achieve performance and availability. How can organizations overcome this issue?

    Optimizing Performance and Availability

    As we know, each piece of the APM puzzle must be incorporated to achieve full-stack visibility and ultimately top performance: user experience, metrics, traces and logs. Following a few key best practices can help achieve overall application health.

    • Early Adoption: Implement application performance and logging tooling as early in the application development lifecycle as possible. Without integrating these tools from the beginning, organizations run the risk of having errors in availability and performance when they deploy the app. This is because one of the key benefits of a full-stack APM solution is the ability to analyze the performance characteristics of the application code and logic itself. If an application isn’t properly written, it can be so inefficient that no amount of resource in production can assure appropriate service delivery.
      Another critical benefit of early lifecycle APM adoption is the knowledge it delivers about app performance can be reviewed with business stakeholders to ensure complete alignment against shared goals—before going live in full production.
    • Integrated Solution: As mentioned above, the biggest challenge to achieving availability and performance is typically organizational structure. For most organizations of a reasonable size, separate teams monitor performance and availability; in some cases there may even be multiple teams monitoring performance and availability, specifically aligned with the individual technologies (e.g. compute, storage, network, web, cloud, etc.) underpinning each application. To get around the obstacles this creates, it’s key to have an integrated solution where every team is looking at the same set of information—the so called single pane of glass. The ability to share information proactively with management across teams is paramount to overall success and avoiding digital war rooms, or at least minimizing time spent in them.
    • Implement High-Value and Appropriately Priced Solutions: Powerful, easy-to-use solutions that will achieve integrated application performance and availability management for any type of organization operating either on-premises and/or cloud-based applications are key. Traditional APM solutions were either so complex to deploy or so expensive that ubiquitous adoption was not operationally or fiscally possible—depriving much of the organization and its applications the benefits of APM by restricting its application to only the most important subset. As a result, quick-to-value and affordable solutions are needed to enable tech pros who may be working in the organizational performance silo to get running quickly and show success to the organization.

    Conclusion

    Although apps serve their own unique purpose—whether that’s for consumer use enabling us to watch TV and movies on-the-go or at the business level to streamline work and communication—they’re all connected by a universal need: performance and availability. Companies must therefore prioritize application health, and in turn creating and delivering an exceptional user experience.

    — David Wagner

  • Understanding and Implementing the APM Puzzle – Performance and Availability

    Understanding and Implementing the APM Puzzle – Performance and Availability

    While every organization is unique, there’s one universal goal everyone can get behind—creating and delivering an exceptional end-user experience. For both classic IT organizations and companies built in the age of cloud, delivering continuous availability and appropriate application performance is key.

    Although digital transformation has become a buzzword some would say is meaningless, the idea of digitizing a traditional company and building new businesses whose foundations are established upon the latest web technologies is critical in today’s IT and non-IT organizations. Think about the prevalence of cloud migration efforts during the past several years. Traditional organizations typically prioritize on-premises applications with increasing quantities of hybrid applications. But, because they aren’t yet fully transitioned to cloud—whether IaaS, PaaS or SaaS—their IT organizations need to live in both universes.

    Monitoring these environments at both the infrastructure and application tiers and across each stage in this transition requires support of a full stack of tools to cover web uptime, user experience, transaction monitoring, application tracing, log analysis and appropriate infrastructure monitoring. That said, modern organizations that have fully embraced cloud and leverage modern microservice architectures have similar challenges, but the exact same level of monitoring visibility requirement.

    Whether public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud, nearly every organization has moved to the cloud in some capacity. Regardless of what the company produces or the services IT provides, it must maintain uptime, availability and seamless performance to create and continuously deliver a user experience rivaling competitors and exceeding user expectations.

    Because let’s face it, even though every business is different and virtually every market is saturated, consumers and B2B companies have more options than ever. Without delivering a solid end-user experience, there’s an ever-increasing plethora of alternative vendors and providers from which customers can choose.

    Public Cloud Platforms for Classic IT Organizations and the Cloud Generation

    Let’s explore a few differences between how traditional IT organizations and cloud-era companies interact with the cloud. At a high level, Azure is a natural choice for IT companies with significant investments in apps traditionally acquired (not built) by the company and managed by their IT team, that are now tasked with digitizing their business by leveraging public cloud platforms. These types of companies often have Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange and other Microsoft products already implemented on-premises, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions as well. If they’re now adding a public cloud platform to their mix, staff expertise and solution familiarity make adopting Microsoft Azure a natural next step. Microsoft has long recognized the need to make these types of transitions and mixtures easier, demonstrated by its Office365 suite (as an example).

    On the flip side, companies that were born fully in the cloud, (i.e., relatively newer organizations without a legacy anything on-premises, with respect to IT infrastructure) will likely have a higher propensity to choose a provider such as AWS or Google Cloud even though Microsoft, Oracle and others are certainly competing there as well. So, it’s not a matter of one being intrinsically better or more fully-featured, but about which is the best fit for the organization and its priorities.

    At the end of the day, however—regardless of organization type or public cloud platform implemented—every company needs monitoring tools and solutions that keep applications up, running and performing seamlessly. With an integrated set of simple, easy-to-use, quick to value and powerful solutions, organizations can achieve truly proactive lifecycle assurance of application availability and performance.

    Uptime and Seamless Performance: Putting Together the APM Puzzle Using All the Pieces

    Each and every piece of the APM puzzle must be incorporated to achieve full-stack visibility and ultimately top performance: user experience, metrics, traces and logs. Having a log management solution monitoring availability, enables proactivity and enables IT to react quickly to help identify and remediate problems is paramount—it’s table stakes that everything be available. After all, if a website or page isn’t accessible, business transactions cannot be processed and that business is effectively down.

    Creating and maintaining a healthy application involves not only ensuring it’s functionally available to users; it must also be performing appropriately—continuously delivering both a reasonably responsive user experience and supporting the required volume of transactional work. This means a complete view into all aspects of performance—from the website and webpages all the way into and across all relevant application components and their associated infrastructure—be proactively visible and monitored.

    There is thus a natural and increasingly urgent workflow affinity between logs and APM—across the development lifecycle. When errors occur, it’s critical to understand, precisely and immediately, where are the impacts on service performance, or if there even are any impacts. Conversely, when application performance issues arise, it’s critical to immediately know exactly which errors—across the complex and constantly changing infrastructure and application stack—are directly related to the problem at hand.

    Without this bi-directional workflow integration, not only can application performance and availability not be managed proactively, but any issues with application service availability and performance will take far longer to diagnose and repair—seriously impacting the business bottom line.

    Just because everything is available doesn’t necessarily mean it’s appropriately performing for the end user trying to use the application.

    With all this in mind, it’s paramount to implement powerful, easy-to-use solutions that’ll achieve integrated application performance and availability management for any type of organization operating on-premises and/or cloud-based applications across all cloud environments.

    Conclusion

    While traditional IT organizations and cloud-only companies are different in many ways, providing exceptional end-user experience and achieving seamless availability and performance (no matter what) is a common and increasingly critical business goal. To achieve business success, organizations should choose a complete suite of simple, powerful and integrated solutions to optimize and manage their cloud-hosted applications and platforms. Anything less leaves the APM puzzle unsolved.

    — David Wagner