Business Transaction Management Blog

Five Keys to Success with APM in Production Environments – Broad Platform Support (Part 4 of 5)

January 5, 2012 at 8:25 pm Diego Lomanto 3 comments

By Diego Lomanto (Twitter: diego_lomanto)

This is the fourth of a five part series where we explore the critical factors of implementing APM in production environments successfully.  You can find partsone , two and three here.  Please check back next for part five. 

In this series we are discussing how the Gartner Magic Quadrant provides a great start to implementing with APM solution.  However, maximizing your APM investment in production hinges on critical capabilities that can make or break an implementation.  Capabilities that don’t get as much coverage in the media. They are:

• Continuous monitoring, NOT exception-based monitoring
• APM analytics that enable you to become more proactive with application/transaction data
• Smart alerting and real-time analytics impact
• Broad platform support to eliminate blind spots in your monitoring strategy
• Enterprise readiness for growth and scalability

Part 4 – Broad Platform Support to Eliminate Blind Spots in your Monitoring Strategy

Your APM solution must be adaptable to support everything you have within your environment.  This includes support not just for application processing tiers, but also databases and middleware, as they are often the cause of performance problems.  A complete APM solution should support a diverse mix of SOA, private and public cloud, middleware, databases, homegrown, legacy and proprietary technology stacks. A solution that will thrive in production should also support applications of unknown design/no access to code.  This provides IT with visibility into 3rd-party applications’ and components’ performance and reduces the time to identify performance issues associated with 3rd party applications and components.

At the heart of broad platform support is the capability to  track each and every transaction instance through its entire life cycle. To enable this, there are multiple techniques to track transactions across virtually any application and environment. Some of these innovative technologies include

Active Context Tracking - ACT technology uses lightweight agents to track cross-tier context and the resource utilization of each transaction across the entire datacenter.

APIs – C, C++, C#, or Java APIs for monitoring transaction flow through proprietary and homegrown components.

Network packet capture – Non-intrusive agents capture all network traffic to identify and measure transactions from the network perspective.

Real-time log parsing – For platforms that are not optimal for instrumentation, real-time log file analysis is used to identify information about transaction flow. The log analysis is seamlessly integrated into the transaction model with no overhead

Passive Context Tracking - When a transaction crosses a component that cannot be monitored (for example, a security appliance that cannot be instrumented and does not have logs), passive context tracking is used to stitch together the flow using an ID common to the different parts of the transaction.

When a transaction enters the system, it is identified by one of the agents and then undergoes classification and analytical processing.  An effective production-ready APM solution continues to track the transaction as it traverses web, application, middleware, and database tiers, while collecting performance and resource consumption metrics at each tier. Even when a transaction makes a call to a tier that isn’t monitored, metrics such as the number of calls and the time spent on that tier are captured.

As we discussed in parts one-three, success in production is contingent upon continuously monitoring as much as possible to derive intelligence right when it’s needed.  The capabilities listed above, out of the box, are important part of the always-on discovery and tracking approach to APM. It is important for the speed of deployment and value provided by the APM solution.  If you have wide gaps in coverage, you simply miss too much and have too many blind spots in your monitoring capabilities.

So, that’s the fourth critical requirement.  Coming up next, and closing out the series, is enterprise scalability.

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