APM definition
Application Performance Management (APM) is the monitoring and management of performance and availability of software applications.
Value proposition of APM
APM has a very clear and distinct primary objective namely to ensure IT service delivery quality and continuity. Due to the nature of the information collected during the primary objective many other additional value added services can be exploited. For simplicity we will call this simply ‘APM additional value’.
APM primary objective
By definition it is the responsibility of APM to quantify service delivery quality in terms of response and continuity. APM should continuously monitor, measure and evaluate service delivery quality. In the case of service degradation or failure APM should:
- Identify the service deviation (preferably pro-active)
- Unpacked to find the exact artefact responsible for the degradation or failure
- Automatically fix the problem or send notification to support entity with the ability to remediate
- Track the progress of remediation and escalate if necessary
- Indicate and expose the latterly affected business services, applications and services
Effectively what we are saying is:
- Know when anything in the IT landscape is about to break or deteriorate (anomaly recognition – preferably predictive)
- Know exactly what is causing the problem (root cause)
- Automatically cure the problem or notified a support resource with the ability to fix the problem
- Manage and track the activities to fix the problem
- Notify management of the problem indicating the affected systems and services and provide estimate time to fix
- Notify business indicating affected business service and target time for restoration
Figure 1: Application Performance Management (APM) Process
APM additional value
Below is an incomplete list of value items derived from a proper APM implementation:
- Enablement of chiefs and executives (and management in general) to clearly understand the service state of the IT landscape both instantaneously and historically
- Enable definitive measurement of service continuity and quality
- Enablement of empirical service level agreements (SLA’s) with internal and external parties pertaining to service delivery excellence.
- DevOps acceleration due to uniformed monitoring down to code level supporting both development and operations covering solutions from design through operational life span.
- Implicit Agile acceleration due to the monitoring being complete and down to code level. This reduce debugging time and provide a much richer picture of the written code behaviour.
- Business intelligence and business information in terms of business processes evoked and completed. Transaction conversion funnels are a good example as it shows the number of business processes started and the numbers successfully completing certain steps in the process enabling the analysis of why customers abandon at a specific business step.
- Business process properties e.g. item types purchased etc. In most cases the monitoring can also provide time of day distribution as well as geographical distribution of customer base. Very few Business Intelligence (BI) tools offer this capability due to the complexity of acquiring the necessary information while this information is already collected and retained in the APM solution.
- Single pane of glass. This is the ability for various users of the monitored information to have different and diverse views of the same set of basic monitored information hence avoiding ambiguities.
- In more mature APM implementations it become possible to manage high level business processes inclusive of sales and support services with the APM solution due to the synergy of the high level abstracted requirements. For example it become possible to notify the sales manager if orders to date is below the average of orders to date in previous months. Another fitting example is to notify the relevant manager if the order delivery exceeded the average time of similar order deliveries inclusive of the manual intervention involved in order delivery.
- Providing monitored information to data analytics shows the promise of value derived in many disciplines like security, customer profiling etc. This however is in its infancy and very few examples exist where real value is realised.
- Distribution of monitored information throughout the organization including direct web access, scheduled reporting, video walling and large screens
APM implementation requirements
It is important for management to clearly understand the APM implementation requirements as it enable good planning and decision making in ensuring the success of any APM implementation. Understanding the implementation requirements is not only limited to new implementations but it also assist in and apply too APM growth and maturity. These requirements remain relevant when honing the APM implementation in order to maximise the benefits from the APM investment. The key APM implementation aspects are:
- APM strategic direction and roadmap
- Monitoring of all IT components and elements
- Monitoring of network traversal paths
- Mapping of support resources to IT components
- Monitoring of application components
- Measurement of end user experience
- Mapping of application components to infrastructure elements
- Mapping of application components to network traversal paths
- Monitoring of business processes
- Mapping of business processes to application components and services
- Event correlation
- APM deployment resource requirements
- APM maintenance obligations
- APM maturity evaluation
When considering an APM implementation or when there is a desire to improve the maturity of the current APM implementation it is recommended to (re-)visit the detail of APM implementation requirements.
Organizational adoption of the APM implementation
Adoption of any APM implementation is paramount to the success of the implementation. Without proper adoption some of the key benefits of the APM implementation would go to waste. Primary adoption areas are:
- Support and maintenance organization
- Management
- Development
- Business
Adoption at support and maintenance organization
Support needs to clearly understand the benefits of the APM implementation and how it could potentially assist in reducing the support workload and incident turnaround time. Support needs to understand how to utilise the APM tools to broaden the understanding of the target incident and to get to the monitored detail of the incident. APM uneducated support resources in practice pose the most resistance until sufficient understanding is gained. Once the understanding and knowledge has been gained support normally become the most dedicated users and supporters.
Adoption at management
In general management is very keen to adopt the APM implementation but it is important that management knows and understand the available capabilities. It is the responsibility of the APM implementation entity to develop the management information in the APM solution and then provide and expose this to management. The APM custodians needs to ensure management knows ‘where to look and knows what to look at’.
Adoption at Development
In general the adoption at development is good. Again it is important to provide development with the necessary guidance to mine the functionality. Clear understanding of the APM implementation by development will ensure significant contributions to DevOps and Agile.
Adoption at Business
Experience has shown that business always appreciate the APM information and usually come with a raft of additional requirements. It is important for the APM custodians to manage the expectations and ensure business understand how to get to and interpret the provided business information.
Where can APM WorX assist you?
- APM strategic roadmap
- APM implementation consultancy
- APM implementation service
- APM maintenance service
- Tool procurement guidance and assistance
- APM maturity evaluation
- APM adoption