Application Performance Management

Application Performance Management (APM) in the Digital Enterprise enables IT professionals to be more successful in managing their company's applications. It explores the fundamentals of application management, examines how the latest technological trends impact application management, and provides best practices for responding to these changes. The recent surge in the use of containers as a way to simplify management and deploy applications has created new challenges, and the convergence of containerization, cloud, mobile, virtualization, analytics, and automation is reshaping the requirements for application management. This book serves as a guide for understanding these dramatic changes and how they impact the management of applications, showing how to create a management strategy, define the underlying processes and standards, and how to select the appropriate tools to enable management processes.

The objective of APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management is to establish reliable application performance management (APM) practices—to demonstrate value, to do it quickly, and to adapt to the client circumstances. It's important to balance long-term goals with short-term deliverables, but without compromising usefulness or correctness. The successful strategy is to establish a few reasonable goals, achieve them quickly, and then iterate over the same topics two more times, with each successive iteration expanding the skills and capabilities of the APM team. This strategy is referred to as “Good, Better, Best”. The application performance monitoring marketplace is very focused on ease of installation, rapid time to usefulness, and overall ease of use. But these worthy platitudes do not really address the application performance management processes that ensure that you will deploy effectively, synergize on quality assurance test plans, triage accurately, and encourage collaboration across the application life cycle that ultimately lowers overall application cost and ensures a quality user experience. These are also fine platitudes but these are the ones that are of interest to your application sponsors. These are the ones for which you need to show value. This CA Press book employs this iterative approach, adapted pragmatically for the realities of your organizational and operational constraints, to realize a future state that your sponsors will find useful, predictable and manageable—and something that they will want to fund. In the meantime, you will learn the useful techniques needed to set up and maintain a useful performance management system utilizing best practices regardless of the software provider(s).

Application Performance Management (APM) in the Digital Enterprise enables IT professionals to be more successful in managing their company’s applications. It explores the fundamentals of application management, examines how the latest technological trends impact application management, and provides best practices for responding to these changes. The recent surge in the use of containers as a way to simplify management and deploy applications has created new challenges, and the convergence of containerization, cloud, mobile, virtualization, analytics, and automation is reshaping the requirements for application management. This book serves as a guide for understanding these dramatic changes and how they impact the management of applications, showing how to create a management strategy, define the underlying processes and standards, and how to select the appropriate tools to enable management processes. Offers a complete framework for implementing effective application management using clear tips and solutions for those responsible for application management Draws upon primary research to give technologists a current understanding of the latest technologies and processes needed to more effectively manage large-scale applications Includes real-world case studies and business justifications that support application management investments

The objective of APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management is to establish reliable application performance management (APM) practices—to demonstrate value, to do it quickly, and to adapt to the client circumstances. It's important to balance long-term goals with short-term deliverables, but without compromising usefulness or correctness. The successful strategy is to establish a few reasonable goals, achieve them quickly, and then iterate over the same topics two more times, with each successive iteration expanding the skills and capabilities of the APM team. This strategy is referred to as “Good, Better, Best”. The application performance monitoring marketplace is very focused on ease of installation, rapid time to usefulness, and overall ease of use. But these worthy platitudes do not really address the application performance management processes that ensure that you will deploy effectively, synergize on quality assurance test plans, triage accurately, and encourage collaboration across the application life cycle that ultimately lowers overall application cost and ensures a quality user experience. These are also fine platitudes but these are the ones that are of interest to your application sponsors. These are the ones for which you need to show value. This CA Press book employs this iterative approach, adapted pragmatically for the realities of your organizational and operational constraints, to realize a future state that your sponsors will find useful, predictable and manageable—and something that they will want to fund. In the meantime, you will learn the useful techniques needed to set up and maintain a useful performance management system utilizing best practices regardless of the software provider(s).

This book provides a holistic and pragmatic approach to performance management throughout the business value chain, and demonstrates the optimal design and use of performance management in order to achieve competitive advantage. A wealth of best practices, case studies and real-world examples are used to reveal the diversity of performance measurement methods, methodologies and principles in practice. Readers will gain comprehensive insights into the status quo of performance management, including primary functions such as supply, operations and sales, and secondary functions like finance, human resources, and information systems. Focusing on ‘best-in-class’ performance excellence, the book offers the ideal guide for any organization pursuing competitive advantages across all corporate functions and focusing on value-adding activities.

WHY IS YOUR APP SLOW AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT? Application Performance Management (APM) field addresses the issue of slow App response times. Learn APM concepts first-hand from veterans who have helped Fortune-100 companies as well as small/medium enterprises to improve their application performance. The authors explain in simple language why an application is slow, what can be done about it, and what are the best practices for achieving good end-user response times. No matter what environment you are dealing with - whether it is consumer, enterprise, cloud, or mobile Apps - APM issues have to be addressed head-on. This is a great introductory book for a wide audience - developers, testers, engineers, managers, project managers, technology leaders, sales managers, consultants, and students alike.

This practical book provides a step-by-step approach to testing mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before they're deployed -- a vital topic to which other books devote one chapter, if that. Businesses today live and die by network applications and web services. Because of the increasing complexity of these programs, and the pressure to deploy them quickly, many professionals don't take the time to ensure that they'll perform well and scale effectively. The Art of Application Performance Testing explains the complete life cycle of the testing process, and demonstrates best practices to help you plan, gain approval for, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. With this book, you'll learn to: Set realistic performance testing goals Implement an effective application performance testing strategy Interpret performance test results Cope with different application technologies and architectures Use automated performance testing tools Test traditional local applications, web-based applications, and web services (SOAs) Recognize and resolves issues that are often overlooked in performance tests Written by a consultant with 30 years of experience in the IT industry and over 12 years experience with performance testing, this easy-to-read book is illustrated with real-world examples and packed with practical advice. The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers you a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises. "Ian has maintained a vendor-agnostic methodology beautifully in this material. The metrics and graphs, along with background information provided in his case studies, eloquently convey to the reader, 'Methodology above all, tools at your discretion...' Ian's expertise shines through throughout the entire reading experience."-- Matt St. Onge, Enterprise Solution Architect, HCL Technologies America / Teradyne