Aspects of Modern APM Solutions

ASPECTS OF MODERN APM SOLUTIONS
Robbert Veraart en Joost van der Pols
codecentric nederland bv

TODAYS CHALLENGES ARE DIFFERENT

-  On Monday, Analyst Firm Gartner released new criteria for APM solutions:
http://blogs.gartner.com/jonah-kowall/?p=83

-  "The market for application performance monitoring (APM) functionality is evolving. As
demand for that functionality spreads across multiple buying centers, users
increasingly require the simultaneous deployment of all five APM functional dimensions
outlined by Gartner" - Jonah Kowall, Will Cappelli


TODAYS CHALLENGES IN APM

-  Complex IT architecture

-  Technology mix

-  Large amount of IT infrastructure

-  Legacy does not go away


TYPICAL(?) APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE

Amazon EC2
Public Cloud

Tomcat

Jboss
MQ
VMware
Spring Private Cloud



Weblogic


TODAYS CHALLENGES IN APM

-  Complex IT architecture

-  Technology mix

-  Large amount of IT infrastructure

-  Legacy does not go away

-  High rate of change

-  Multiple distributed development teams

-  Operations has little insight


APM NEEDS TO PROVIDE

-  Single point for application health monitoring
-  APM solution has to support most existing and future technologies
-  Including End User Monitoring

-  High grade of automation
-  Deployment of the APM solution
-  Discovery of application architecture and code execution paths
-  Auto Configuration without expert knowledge
-  Change Adoption
-  Behavior learning

-  Meaningful data presentation
-  User view of transactions
-  How does the end user notice problems
-  Different views for various stakeholder


APM NEEDS TO PROVIDE

-  Scalable solution that can monitor
-  Tenths, hundreds, thousands of machines
-  Millions and Billions of transactions per minute
-  Thousands of users

-  Tools to narrow down root causes
-  Operations needs to find the needle in the haystack
-  Provide detail level information to responsible development team

-  Tools to monitor the application
-  Health
-  Load and Trends
-  Aggregation and Reporting


MAIN ASPECT


MTTR – MEAN TIME TO REPAIR

-  Is there a problem?
-  Baselines provide realistic thresholds

-  Where is the problem?
-  Distributed transaction tracing helps locating the root cause
-  Often connected to responsible dev team

-  What is the problem?
-  Drill Down allows finding details
-  Code Execution
-  Environment Metrics
-  User Data

-  Improving MTTR is the main reason for APM


SIDE ASPECTS


LOAD AND PERFORMANCE TESTS

-  Monitoring is more important than test
-  Reality is different from test environment
-  Not reproducable problems happen in reality

-  Testing allows early feedback
-  No real customers harmed
-  Early tests are an integral part of agile methodologies

-  APM Solutions should support Production as well as Test environments


EASE OF USE

-  No time for complex tool
-  Time savers cannot require extra time

-  Not everybody is a performance expert
-  Collect enough data to troubleshoot problems without knowledge
-  Provide certain degree of automatic problem resolution
-  Still some problems require performance know how

-  Apple raised the bar for everybody


DEVOPS

1.  Application Complexity cannot be handled by Operations
2.  Operational Complexity is unknown to Developers

-  DevOps lets development and operations teams cooperate more closely
-  Developers learn how servers are set up and configured
-  Operations learn how applications are supposed to work
-  Developers learn the pain to be called during night
-  Operations learn development practices like test and version control

-  Major improvement for application

-  Development and Operations share responsibility for Applications
-  They need shared tooling


SUMMARY


SUMMARY

-  IT Applications change fast
-  APM Solution needs to adapt automatically
-  Support for multiple languages, frameworks and protocols

-  Operations need wide overview, but Developers need deep insight
-  An APM Solution has to provide both

-  Alerts need to be actionable
-  False alarms disturb
-  No red light should be ever ignored
-  APM solution should be able to alert the right thing


A SOLUTION


Who is AppDynamics

AppDynamics Manages
e-Business Performance
To Perfection

Our Heritage Company Facts
•  Founded in 2008, Venture Funded
•  Based in San Francisco
•  >200 Customers

18 Copyright © AppDynamics. All rights reserved. "

The generational shift in app architectures
Circa 2000 Weblogic/
Weblogic/
WebSphere
Weblogic/
WebSphere Oracle
Weblogic/
WebSphere
Solaris
WebSphere
Solaris
Solaris
Solaris

•  Most management solutions
Circa 2010 architected in the 1990s
•  SOA •  Change is now the constant
•  Agile Development Amazon EC2
Public Cloud
•  Open Source
•  Virtualization
Tomcat
•  Cloud
JBoss
MQ
VMware
Spring Private Cloud

Weblogic

19 5 april 2012 | Copyright © 2010 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. "

New Challenges for Operations

New World: Distributed applications running constantly
Changing code on Dynamic infrastructure

Key Question:
•  How can we assure business service availability when the
code and the topology are constantly changing?

Solution: Monitor the “Business Transaction”
•  A “constant” in the ever changing infrastructure
•  Maps directly to end-user quality of experience


The Only Operations Question That Matters:


Example – I Operate ACME Bank

You are concerned about :
•  Application Service Availability
•  Are users able to Login to the site?
•  Are users able to View Accounts?
•  Are users able to Transfer Funds?
•  Are users able to Pay Bills?
•  User Experience
•  Is their user experience satisfactory?
•  Immediate Remediation
•  Pro-actively alert
•  Triage and isolate root cause before it affects my business


Is the “Application” healthy?

Business Transaction Availability and User Experience

Login

View Accounts

Transfer Funds

Pay Bills


IT – Monitoring Investment to Date
Value
Delivered
Business
Processing

Application Code

JVM

OS

Infrastructure
$ Spent
$ Investment in Monitoring


AppDynamics Monitors Production

•  Automatically discovers your Business Transactions, your infrastructure
and your architecture

•  Automatically/dynamically adjusts to changes in code and architecture

•  Monitors every transaction In Production at Low Overhead

•  Automatically determines SLAs using calculated baselines


AppDynamics System Architecture

•  Business Transaction
Identification and
data collection
Application
•  Byte Code Server Agent
Instrumentation (JVM/CLR)

AppDynamics
One way HTTPS Controller
connections

•  Machine statistics • Central Management Server
data collection
•  Custom metrics
Machine • Standalone, out-of-band
collection Agent

26 © AppDynamics. All Rights Reserved.

Goals of Your Production Solution
Would you agree that you want the maximum understanding
of your production processing for the least amount
configuration and management effort?

1. The solution must be designed to run in production
•  Low overhead with complete code coverage!

2. The solution must automatically discover the application’s
architecture, infrastructure,
transactions and code
•  Handles the constant change and enables Agile development

3. The solution must be Business Transaction Centric
•  Directly maps to business value and end-user satisfaction!
•  Designed for modern distributed app architectures


Use Cases

•  Improve visibility of transactions in production
•  Reduce MTTR for production problems
•  Proactive application degradation alerting
•  Business Transaction SLAs - Trending and analysis
•  Agile development support
•  Pre-production performance testing and optimization
•  Automated problem response

28 © AppDynamics. All Rights Reserved.

Strong Adoption across Industries
Common Theme: Using in Production to Improve SLAs and Lower MTTR

Aspects of Modern APM Solutions

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