devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: Application Performance Management/Monitoring

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

January 2, 2020
Instana Rolls Up 3 Acquisitions to Extend APM Reach

Instana revealed today it has acquired three technologies that will extend the capabilities of an application performance management (APM) platform optimized for microservices-based applications.

Capabilities being added to the Instana platform include StackImpact, a polyglot production application profiler developed by StackImpact GmbH that can be applied to applications built in multiple languages; a high-frequency metrics analysis tool developed by BeeInstant; and a tool for analyzing complex system signals developed by JINSPIRED B.V.

Instana has acquired StackImpact and BeeInstant outright and acquired only the software JINSPIRED B.V developed.

Instana CEO Mirko Novakovic said that as organizations embrace microservices typically built using containers that get deployed on Kubernetes clusters, IT organizations are discovering their existing APM platforms are not able to monitor and observe microservices-based applications to the level of depth required.

The Instana APM platform achieves that goal by automatically deploying monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack. Those sensors trace all application requests without requiring any configuration or application restarts. Instana also detects changes in the application environment that allow it to adjust models and visualizations in real-time.

As IT organizations embrace the Instana APM platform to manage microservices-based applications, Novakovic said they discover they can employ Instana also to monitor legacy monolithic applications, enabling them to standardize on one APM platform. Instana currently claims more than 300 customers, most of which are using its APM to monitor multiple types of application workloads, he said.

In general, Novakovic said it’s becoming easier for organizations to swap out APM platforms because the proprietary agents that many legacy APM platforms rely on are being replaced by open source initiatives that make it possible to gather metrics from multiple platforms. In fact, as APM platforms continue to evolve, Novakovic said it’s apparent that tools for tracing, tracking metrics and log analytics are all starting to converge.

Of course, the biggest challenge Instana and other providers of APM platforms face today is that many developers are relying on open source Prometheus software developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Instana and other APM platform providers are making a case instead for commercial platforms that provide richer visualizations and are easier to employ than Prometheus.

It’s still too early to say how the APM platform wars might play out. However, all the dependencies between microservices make APM platforms a requirement today. Historically, many IT organizations have opted to make use of APM platforms only for their most mission-critical monolithic applications because of the costs involved. Many organizations going forward are likely to try to strike a balance between APM costs and the need to monitor application services more broadly.

Naturally, different DevOps teams within an organization may wind up preferring to employ different APM platforms. However, the pressure to standardize on a single APM platform to contain costs will only increase over time.

— Mike Vizard

December 17, 2019
SolarWinds Acquires VividCortex for Database Monitoring

SolarWinds announced this week it is extending its portfolio of DevOps tools with the acquisition of VividCortex, a provider of tools for monitoring a wide range of databases that is delivered as a set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Company president and CEO Kevin Thompson said the acquisition of VividCortex adds a database monitoring platform capable of monitoring so-called cloud-native databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, MongoDB and Redis, complementing the company’s existing tools for monitoring databases to support legacy applications.

In addition, Thompson noted the VividCortex tools are highly extensible; support for a new database can be added within 90 days.

VividCortex claims to have nearly 300 customers today, including Etsy, GitHub, SendGrid, DraftKings and Yelp. SolarWinds, meanwhile, boasts more than 300,000 customers.

Thompson said the number of databases organizations need to monitor is increasing as open source alternatives gain ground on proprietary databases. The result is a hybrid computing environment that requires tools to manage centrally since it’s not practical to try and master each set of monitoring tools provided for each database platform, added Thompson.

IT organizations also want to be able to compare and contrast the cost of deploying workloads on databases running in different environments, he added. Many IT organizations have already discovered that the cost of deploying certain types of workloads on public clouds is more expensive than anticipated.

Thompson said it’s not really feasible to observe an application without being able to monitor the underlying database on which that application depends. In this respect, VividCortex adds a critical capability for DevOps teams, he said. SolarWinds intends to integrate VividCortex with a growing portfolio of DevOps tools that already includes a range of application performance management (APM) and infrastructure management tools. As is always the case, Thompson said IT organizations should also expect SolarWinds to drive the cost of employing database monitoring tools lower.

As IT continues to evolve Thompson said SolarWinds believes many more organizations will embrace best DevOps practices. Much of that effort will involve retraining existing staff, because there are not enough college graduates to fill a rapidly expanding skills gap within IT organizations.

It’s not clear to what degree lowering the cost of tools will accelerate the transition DevOps. Many organizations already rely on open source tools. However, the total cost of setting up and maintaining those tools often winds up being higher than a SaaS platform. In addition, all the upgrades to the SaaS platform are handled by the provider of the service.

In many cases, developers wind up embracing open source tools to lower the cost of building an application, which the IT operations team then manages using commercial tools once that application is deployed in a production environment. In some cases, however, open source tools embraced by developers also end up being employed in the production environment. In either case, IT organizations now have more tools to choose from than ever.

— Mike Vizard

December 13, 2019
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

December 6, 2019
LogicMonitor Embraces AIOps

LogicMonitor today announced the general availability of LM Intelligence, an extension of its monitoring platform that leverages machine learning algorithms to identify potential issues that are indicative of a major impending outage.

Sarah Terry, manager of product management for LogicMonitor, said rather than acquiring a separate AIOps platform, it makes more sense to employ machine learning algorithms within the context of a tool that DevOps teams already are using to monitor their IT environment. Monitoring platforms collect the massive amount of data required to train those algorithms, but a separate AIOps platform has to find a way to collect that data, noted Terry.

The LM Intelligence module created by LogicMonitor provides a root cause analysis (RCA) capability that automatically discovers infrastructure topology in both cloud and on-premises IT environments. Once an issue is discovered, LM Intelligence will aggregate all the alerts being generated into a single notification that pertains to the root cause of any potential issue. That capability will substantially reduce the amount of alert fatigue that today results in IT teams often disregarding what could be a critical alert that would have averted a system failure, said Terry.

DevOps teams can also employ LM Intelligence to define expected performance ranges for IT resources based on historical trends. Any anomaly outside those ranges will generate a notification.

As IT environments become more complex, thanks in part to the rise of multi-cloud computing and microservices-based applications based on containers, it won’t be feasible for the average IT team to identify all the relevant events that might be impacting that IT environment without help. There are simply too many parameters that need to be tracked. Tools such as LM Intelligence don’t replace the need for IT operations expertise as much as they augment the capabilities and expertise of the teams trying to manage complex IT environments, where there are large numbers of dependencies between systems. In effect, Terry said, tools such as LM Intelligence will enable DevOps teams to identify the signal in all the noise being generated within an IT environment.

As IT management tools continue to evolve, DevOps teams should expect to see reliance on machine learning algorithms to become more pervasive. Rather than being a standalone platform, AIOps is quickly morphing into a feature that will become a capability embedded across a wide range of tools.

Of course, each DevOps team will need to decide to what degree they want to trust any form of AI. However, the longer algorithms collect and analyze data, the more accurate they tend to become. That doesn’t mean DevOps teams should automate processes based on the recommendations of an AI engine; there are likely to be parameters that an AI engine may not have accounted for that could have an adverse impact. However, having the equivalent of a digital assistant that provides timely advice may soon prove indispensable.

— Mike Vizard

December 4, 2019
The Battle for the Frontend: Rethinking APM

With the battle for the backend between data centers and cloud largely over, application development is the next frontier ripe for innovation. Studies project mobile app revenue at $935.2 billion by 2023 and Internet of Things (IoT) installations at $75.44 billion by 2025. It’s no surprise that software innovation is ramping up around application development in a big way. At the same time, the desktop is still a primary interface in the workplace, which has given rise to a wave of browser-based applications for enterprise collaboration and efficiency.

Apps—both on devices and in-browser—are effectively what businesses run on. New JavaScript-based Single-Page Applications (SPAs) are replacing legacy cloud stacks, where the software runs primarily in a customer’s browser. However, this approach creates an observability gap for teams under pressure to deliver better software more quickly. Because no application is siloed, the distributed nature of modern applications adds further complexity—and increases the risk for defects—for developers, who must code faster, smarter and better to keep their businesses competitive in an application-centric world.

The Battle for the Frontend

IDC predicts that by 2022, more than 60% of global GDP will be digitized, with growth in every industry driven by digitally enhanced offerings, operations and relationships—and applications will be the primary method of delivery. Companies in all industries are battling for users, revenue and reputation only, but only those companies with the best software will remain contenders. To innovate continuously, ensure optimal user experiences, and ultimately, retain their competitive advantage, enterprises must ship code quickly, every day and with fewer errors.

Application errors and crashes will dramatically spike churn rates, kill conversions and impact brand reputation and customer retention. As tolerance for faulty performance is rapidly diminishing, user experience becomes a business-critical concern that has a substantial impact on a company’s bottom line. While companies with faulty code are dealing with the fallout, those that rely on modern application performance monitoring (APM) are shipping better code more quickly and with less risk.

These new business drivers, along with an explosion of devices—from smartphones to IoT devices—have led developers to move their code closer to customers to increase code speed and improve scale. But this shift means software is run on customer devices over which developers have no control, a reality that inevitably creates its own set of new problems to monitor. To win this battle for the frontend, development teams that create games, mobile applications, IoT and other high-performance applications need rich insights into application health in order to quickly and continuously fix software errors, all with minimal impact.

Rethinking APM

Unfortunately, many legacy application monitoring tools do not solve for the frontend. They are fragmented, or specialized, and missing support for JavaScript, mobile, desktop apps or embedded IoT devices—despite these platforms being a significant part of the application ecosystem. Legacy tools focus more on system behavior, offering performance metrics on availability, throughput and latency, but miss the mark when it comes to actionable insight that helps frontend developers make sense of complexity and quickly get to the root cause of errors.

Modern applications require a holistic approach to monitoring that provides deep context and understanding about how to address issues when they arise, instead of simply displaying the symptoms of a problem. This approach should involve collecting and analyzing transactional traces, scaling search and storage to handle full traces, and building intelligent algorithms to detect and analyze issues. By moving monitoring from production environments to test environments, development teams can accelerate the software development lifecycle and reduce the impact on customers. APM must integrate with continuous delivery tools to monitor continuous health mechanisms.

— David Cramer

November 15, 2019
Anaxi Adds Reporting Capabilities to ALM Tool

Anaxi today announced it has added reporting capabilities to its namesake application lifecycle management (ALM) tool that make it possible to update stakeholders about the status of software development projects residing in repositories such as GitHub and Bitbucket Cloud as well as project management applications such as Jira.

Company CEO Marc Verstaen said reporting capabilities will make it easier to employ Anaxi to, for example, keep business leaders apprised of updates to software development initiatives by enabling IT leaders to generate a report similar to how business leaders today employ a business intelligence (BI) application to share sales forecasts.

The Anaxi tool is designed to provide IT leaders with a single tool for tracking progress being made across multiple DevOps platforms. Verstaen said as more organizations begin to realize they are really software companies, interest in software delivery management tools is on the rise. The reporting challenge IT leaders face is the information they need to create a holistic report lies in multiple repositories because of the inherently fragmented nature of the DevOps tool chain, he said.

To make it easier to adopt Anaxi, the ALM tool Data employs the same credentials organizations have created to access GitHub, Bitbucket and Jira. The Anaxi app connects directly to a user’s GitHub or Bitbucket repositories and Jira projects to ensure data privacy and security. Any action performed on the Anaxi applications is written back on GitHub, Bitbucket and Jira to maintain consistency across projects involving multiple team members.

At its core, Anaxi is pulling metadata from DevOps tools to apply analytics to track individual developer productivity and team performance. IT leaders can, for example, analyze how much code has been added and removed, refactoring and code churn on a weekly basis. Anaxi can be used either in place of a project management application or as a complement to an existing project management tool to make analytics more accessible.

The primary goal is to make it easier for IT leaders to identify DevOps bottlenecks and prioritize projects in a way that advances business goals. Too many organizations are writing more code than ever only to discover projects are being held up because a single component on which every other module depends is behind schedule. Many of the developers writing that code could have been working on other projects if IT leaders had been made aware of changes that needed to be made to the schedule based on the anticipated delay to another project. Anaxi essentially applies predictive analytics to software development projects to determine based on past histories the likelihood of a deadline being met, Verstaen said.

Armed with that intelligence, IT leaders can either proactively reallocate how resources or allocated or inform business stakeholders to changes in delivery schedules. In either case, Versaten says the goal is to enable IT leaders to avert any software development crisis that might arise.

The Anaxi app is free to use by teams of up to 10 members. Teams of more than 10 users will be required to adopt a premium plan priced at $19 per month per user.

— Mike Vizard

October 17, 2019
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
October 16, 2019
Dynatrace Extends APM Reach Into Business Analytics

A growing number of providers of tools widely employed by DevOps teams that are extending their reach into business analytics has been joined by Dynatrace. The provider of a namesake application performance management (APM) platform unveiled a set of business analytics applications aimed at application owners who need to understand how changes to the application experience their organization is providing ultimately impacts the business.

Ajay Gandhi, vice president of product marketing for Dynatrace, said Digital Business Analytics applications from Dynatrace extends the single-agent architecture Dynatrace created for its Software Intelligence Platform to make it easy to employ an APM service delivered via the cloud into the realm of business analytics.

The difference between the applications being made available by Dynatrace and traditional business intelligence (BI) applications is the agent software Dynatrace developed enables application owners to track all events in real-time, said Gandhi.

As organizations launch digital transformation initiatives, Gandhi said many discover they lack visibility into the actual end user experience. The suite of Digital Business Analytics applications provides access to a set of applications that enables application owners to track transactions as well as metrics such as conversions and revenue performance by product, customer segment and geography.

Gandhi noted organizations don’t necessarily need to have embraced best DevOps practices to derive value from the company’s analytics applications. However, those that have embraced DevOps are likely to appreciate the value of these applications because they view themselves as a software company that happens to build a specific product or digital service.

It’s not clear to what degree application owners may be willing to give up relying on spreadsheets and legacy BI applications they have relied on for decades to manage the business. However, a case can be made for aligning the business to IT more closely by tracking the events in real-time as they occur across application environments and the IT infrastructure on which they depend. In fact, the one thing that has always differentiated Dynatrace is its ability to leverage an artificial intelligence (AI) engine, dubbed Davis, to surface events and deliver actionable intelligence by identifying the root cause of an issue, said Gandhi.

Other DevOps vendors that are venturing into the realm of business analytics include CloudBees and GitLab. As these vendors increasingly realize that business processes now frequently revolve around DevOps processes, they all see an opportunity to extend their franchises by providing analytics applications that are aimed well beyond their existing base of IT users. Less clear right now is which set of tools within a DevOps toolchain will serve as the primary source of data for those analytics applications. However, Gandhi did note that unlike continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms, APM services can provide real-time visibility into the actual digital experiences that change as various events impact production applications.

Regardless of the ultimate source of data, however, the one thing that is certain is the level of insight business users can have into application development and deployment processes trends is, for better or worse, about to increase substantially.

— Mike Vizard

October 9, 2019
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

October 7, 2019