Moving your applications to the cloud has undeniable benefits. The cloud offers dynamic environments where you can spin up instances quickly, only consume what you need, and eliminate the costs of renting or purchasing expensive servers.
But the cloud also means developers are building software on a platform they don't "own", where things can change in an instant. There is no real-time insight into the performance and health of the infrastructure, to say nothing of the applications that run on it.
When things go wrong, it's hard to know where the bottlenecks are. Is the application consuming too much CPU? Is an unresponsive API causing it to time out? Is network latency degrading application performance? How do you know what you don't know?
These issues eat into your bottom line and negatively impact customer satisfaction. And while you can't anticipate every potential problem, you can be prepared to avoid many of them.
Here are four best practices to optimize your application performance monitoring:
1. Collaboration
Invite other team members to participate in your APM tool. You can set role-based access controls that grant edit privileges to admins, or restrict read-only users to see only systems with a certain tag. This gives users access to the features and data they need to do their jobs, without distracting them with superfluous information.
Some products offer deep URLs to facilitate information sharing across teams, and also allow you to annotate important events that correlate to subsequent performance changes.
2. Tagging
Alerts defined by tags allow you to customize how, when and why you're being notified about the performance of your applications. For instance, if you have a set of front-end application servers behind a load balancer, you may want to tag them "frontend" and create a unique alert for each set of performance metrics that you want to monitor.
When used correctly, include and exclude tags, process alerting and threshold alerts can help users react quickly and efficiently to solve performance issues.
3. Automation
The self-service, automated provisioning of IT resources has come of age and is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Chef and Puppet are two popular orchestration engines that allow you to spin servers up and down in response to evolving business needs. Your APM solution should integrate tightly with existing automation tools, modifying automatically in response to operating environment changes, and providing real-time visibility into all your Chef- and Puppet-deployed applications and services.
4. Custom metrics
No two businesses have the same goals and objectives. The same can be said for application performance monitoring metrics. Custom metrics provide enhanced visibility into specific areas of an application where you want to collect, view or analyze additional information – such as page load time, web transaction response time or database query execution time. Setting these up should be as easy as modifying a simple script and creating a custom dashboard to display your data.
ABOUT Josh Stephens
As Vice President of Product Strategy at Idera, Josh Stephens brings nearly 20 years of experience in the technology industry. Prior to Idera, he founded a consulting and technology company focused on helping companies adapt their product and go to market strategies to take advantage of the high velocity, inside sales model focused around inbound marketing and social media. Previously, he was VP of technology at SolarWinds where he spent more than a dozen years helping to define and innovate their product and go to market strategies. Earlier in his career, Stephens spent time at Greenwich Technology Partners, International Network Services, and the United States Air Force.
The Latest
The edge brings computing resources and data storage closer to end users, which explains the rapid boom in edge computing, but it also generates a huge amount of data ... 44% of organizations are investing in edge IT to create new customer experiences and improve engagement. To achieve those goals, edge services observability should be a centerpoint of that investment ...
The growing adoption of efficiency-boosting technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) helps counteract staffing shortages, rising labor costs, and talent gaps, while giving employees more time to focus on strategic projects. This trend is especially evident in the government contracting sector, where, according to Deltek's 2024 Clarity Report, 34% of GovCon leaders rank AI and ML in their top three technology investment priorities for 2024, above perennial focus areas like cybersecurity, data management and integration, business automation and cloud infrastructure ...
While IT leaders are preparing organizations for accelerated generative AI (GenAI) adoption, C-suite executives' confidence in their IT team's ability to deliver basic services is declining, according to a study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value ...
The consequences of outages have become a pressing issue as the largest IT outage in history continues to rock the world with severe ramifications ... According to the Catchpoint Internet Resilience Report, these types of disruptions, internet outages in particular, can have severe financial and reputational impacts and enterprises should strongly consider their resilience ...
Everyday AI and digital employee experience (DEX) are projected to reach mainstream adoption in less than two years according to the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Digital Workplace Applications, 2024 ...
When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster ...
To get a better understanding of the top issues facing IT teams in financial services, Auvik recently released its 2024 Financial Services IT Trends Report ... Not surprisingly, the experience of FinServ IT teams is significantly impacted by the onslaught of cyberattacks facing financial services organizations as well as the complex regulatory environment of this industry ...
The CrowdStrike outage serves as a potent illustration of the risks associated with complex security environments. Enterprises are increasingly advised to consider simpler, more robust solutions that do not rely heavily on reactive security measures ...
When IT leaders started telling Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) more than a year ago that their personnel were using premium ChatGPT subscriptions to create device configs and automation scripts, we knew the industry was on the verge of a revolution ...
The rapid rise of creative "right-brain" generative AI (GenAI) has opened the door to greater adoption of the more analytical "left-brain" AI decisioning solutions by global businesses, according to new research from Pegasystems ...