Business Transaction Management Blog

Five Keys to Success with APM in Production Environments – Enterprise Scale and Readiness (Part 5 of 5)

January 17, 2012 at 4:08 pm Diego Lomanto 1 comment

By Diego Lomanto (Twitter: diego_lomanto)

Welcome to the concluding post in our series on the Five Keys to Success with APM in Production Environments.  In this series we have been discussing how the Gartner Magic Quadrant provides a great start to implementing an APM solution.  However, maximizing your APM investment in production hinges on critical capabilities that can make or break an implementation.   To refresh your memory, so far we’ve covered:

• 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

Now, let’s talk about enterprise scale and readiness

Enterprise Scale and Readiness

If you can check off everything above – you’re in good shape.  But there’s one more factor to success with APM in production.  When you roll out your investment, will it be able to handle the scale of your business today and when it grows?  If you are investing in APM, then you probably have a high-volume of critical transactions to analyze.  Your solution must be able to handle hundreds of millions of transactions per day.  It cannot fail just as transactions sharply rise.  These are precisely the times you need APM!  It goes back to the whole continuous monitoring vs exception-based monitoring argument and ensuring that the solution does not fail at crunch time, or work around limitations by limiting scale of deployment.

You must also be sure that the solution itself can scale easily as your environment grows.  IT is fluid, and APM must be as well.  It’s not just about number of transactions either.  Determine if it’s easy to add tracking on new tiers or is that a whole project unto itself?  Make sure your vendor provides a path to application monitoring expansion that is manageable.

Speaking of manageability, some other key requirements are that the solution should not have a single point of failure, should be able to be remotely configured and should have a high availability.  In addition, whatever method of tracking employed should have low overhead so you that it doesn’t crash once you put it into production.  This is typically a problem for exception-based solutions so keep your eyes on that.

Now, You are Prepared

Ok, now we you have a better handle on the ins and outs of APM in production.  It’s important that you pick a product that not only includes the five dimensions of APM, but also can run effectively in production and provide the right information to you at the right time.  If you look for these requirements during the research phase, you’ll have a much better experience during roll out.  And your solution will provide much more value, both for IT and the enterprise.

Thanks for tuning in during this series.  It’s been great walking through these critical success factors and judging by the traffic it’s helped a few people.  If you have any comments, I would love to hear them in the comment box below, or on twitter @diego_lomanto.

diego_lomanto

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