Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced a collaboration with Microsoft that utilizes the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to enhance Check Point Infinity AI Copilot, marking a significant advancement in cyber security AI applications.
In an age of big data, more must mean better, right? Scan the APM marketplace and you’d think that there are legions of data nerds eager to swim in data, painstakingly applying their tightly guarded expertise to reduce their MTTI (mean time to innocence). The reality is that no one in IT has the time. It’s answers, not data that’s paramount.
How did we get to this state of data bloat? The biggest cause is not fully understanding the real-world users of application monitoring. Just as IT managers know that great APM starts with the end user experience, vendor product design must start with those IT users in mind. Sounds obvious, yes, but it’s too easy to fall into a vicious circle of capturing and reporting every metric with the assumption a human is eager to own the forensics.
As discussed in a previous blog, selecting the right APM for DevOps is an “EPIC” decision. Easy, Proactive, Intelligent, and Collaborative is a user-driven approach to APM focused squarely on helping ITOps teams succeed at managing application performance.
To build an E.P.I.C. APM solution, requires not only a clinical understanding of the most common needs by role type, but also working with real users; understanding a day in their lives and truly empathizing with their challenges. How do you make the clickpath to answers truly intuitive? What’s the preferred way to easily share insights with colleagues? Answers to these and other questions means really spending a day in the life with many different roles such as application developer, APM administrator, level 1 support analyst, production support analyst, middleware specialists, test engineers, production performance engineers and more.
The developers of an E.P.I.C. APM solution must understand the stories behind each of the roles and at a very practical level, what steps and methods they enact for success. And here’s the kicker: to create an APM solution that its users are passionate about, you must be passionate about them. So, in addition to having deep day in the life insights, the developers of an E.P.I.C. APM solution must truly empathize with and care about the success of each role.
Here are some examples of how E.P.I.C. APM delivers on its passion for APM users:
Easy
Making APM easy to adopt, fast time-to-value, simple-to-use, easy to manage and configure. For example, simplify management for thousands of agents with a central repository of all agent configurations and meta-data across all of your APM clusters in minutes and not hours.
Proactive
In agile environments the concept of “canary-testing” new code (against unsuspecting) users has grown in popularity to gain early detection and prevent bigger issues during the full push of a revision. Proactive approaches to APM ensure that insights are gathered quickly and shared with development, versus the ‘wait and see’ tactic.
Intelligent
Collecting and delivering data is one thing, making it actionable is another. APM can be smarter. For example, automatically detecting degradation in one user’s experience and pinpointing the code or even infrastructure that is the cause. Instead of manually digging to get call stack visibility, transaction traces for that particular issue are surfaced automatically.
Collaborative
Enable better communication between Dev and Ops specialists to resolve problems faster by utilizing the same production tool in development, and with a unified view of the infrastructure and apps that affect business services. For example, operations providing real world data to development to make enhancements to apps more relevant and improve performance.
E.P.I.C. may sound like a clever marketing acronym but when we speak with the real front-line users of APM these are the areas that they care the most about. Designing for their unique needs is producing a new number of role-specific features that help convert big data into big answers.
Kieran Taylor is Sr Director, Product & Solutions Marketing, APM & DevOps, CA Technologies .
Industry News
ArmorCode announced ArmorCode Risk Prioritization, providing a 3D scoring approach for managing application security risks.
AppViewX and Fortanix announced a partnership to offer cloud-delivered secure digital identity management and code signing.
WaveMaker has updated its platform in response to customer demand for more sophisticated API and code management tools.
Vercara announced the launch of UltraAPI™, a product suite that protects APIs and web applications from malicious bots and fraudulent activity while ensuring regulatory compliance.
Legit Security announced the launch of its standalone enterprise secrets scanning product, which can detect, remediate, and prevent secrets exposure across the software development pipeline.
Progress announced a strategic partnership with Veeam® Software, the #1 leader by market share in Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery, to provide customers with an enterprise-ready cyber defense solution that strengthens the security of their business-critical data.
GitGuardian released its Software Composition Analysis (SCA) module.
DataStax announced a milestone in its journey to simplify enterprise retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for developers by integrating with Microsoft Semantic Kernel.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. is collaborating with NVIDIA to enhance the security of AI cloud infrastructure. Integrating NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, which feature a broad range of purpose-built, innovative security capabilities, the new Check Point AI Cloud Protect solution will help prevent threats at both the network and host levels.
Sentry announced the release of Autofix, an AI-powered feature to debug and fix code in minutes, saving important time and resources.
Apiiro announced a product integration and partnership with Secure Code Warrior, the agile developer security training platform, to extend its ASPM technology and processes to the people layer.
Progress announced that Progress® Semaphore™, its metadata management and semantic AI platform, was named a Champion in SoftwareReviews’ 2024 Metadata Management Emotional Footprint Awards.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®) has partnered with Udemy, an online skills marketplace and learning platform.
GitLab has acquired Oxeye, the provider of a cloud-native application security and risk management solution.