Red Hat and Oracle announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute Virtual Machines (VMs).
In an age of big data, more must mean better, right? Scan the APM marketplace and you’d think that there are legions of data nerds eager to swim in data, painstakingly applying their tightly guarded expertise to reduce their MTTI (mean time to innocence). The reality is that no one in IT has the time. It’s answers, not data that’s paramount.
How did we get to this state of data bloat? The biggest cause is not fully understanding the real-world users of application monitoring. Just as IT managers know that great APM starts with the end user experience, vendor product design must start with those IT users in mind. Sounds obvious, yes, but it’s too easy to fall into a vicious circle of capturing and reporting every metric with the assumption a human is eager to own the forensics.
As discussed in a previous blog, selecting the right APM for DevOps is an “EPIC” decision. Easy, Proactive, Intelligent, and Collaborative is a user-driven approach to APM focused squarely on helping ITOps teams succeed at managing application performance.
To build an E.P.I.C. APM solution, requires not only a clinical understanding of the most common needs by role type, but also working with real users; understanding a day in their lives and truly empathizing with their challenges. How do you make the clickpath to answers truly intuitive? What’s the preferred way to easily share insights with colleagues? Answers to these and other questions means really spending a day in the life with many different roles such as application developer, APM administrator, level 1 support analyst, production support analyst, middleware specialists, test engineers, production performance engineers and more.
The developers of an E.P.I.C. APM solution must understand the stories behind each of the roles and at a very practical level, what steps and methods they enact for success. And here’s the kicker: to create an APM solution that its users are passionate about, you must be passionate about them. So, in addition to having deep day in the life insights, the developers of an E.P.I.C. APM solution must truly empathize with and care about the success of each role.
Here are some examples of how E.P.I.C. APM delivers on its passion for APM users:
Easy
Making APM easy to adopt, fast time-to-value, simple-to-use, easy to manage and configure. For example, simplify management for thousands of agents with a central repository of all agent configurations and meta-data across all of your APM clusters in minutes and not hours.
Proactive
In agile environments the concept of “canary-testing” new code (against unsuspecting) users has grown in popularity to gain early detection and prevent bigger issues during the full push of a revision. Proactive approaches to APM ensure that insights are gathered quickly and shared with development, versus the ‘wait and see’ tactic.
Intelligent
Collecting and delivering data is one thing, making it actionable is another. APM can be smarter. For example, automatically detecting degradation in one user’s experience and pinpointing the code or even infrastructure that is the cause. Instead of manually digging to get call stack visibility, transaction traces for that particular issue are surfaced automatically.
Collaborative
Enable better communication between Dev and Ops specialists to resolve problems faster by utilizing the same production tool in development, and with a unified view of the infrastructure and apps that affect business services. For example, operations providing real world data to development to make enhancements to apps more relevant and improve performance.
E.P.I.C. may sound like a clever marketing acronym but when we speak with the real front-line users of APM these are the areas that they care the most about. Designing for their unique needs is producing a new number of role-specific features that help convert big data into big answers.
Kieran Taylor is Sr Director, Product & Solutions Marketing, APM & DevOps, CA Technologies .
Industry News
The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University announced the release of a tool to give a comprehensive visualization of the complete DevSecOps pipeline.
Synopsys has entered into a definitive agreement with Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. and Francisco Partners.
Postman released v11, a significant update that speeds up development by reducing collaboration friction on APIs.
Sysdig announced the launch of the company’s Runtime Insights Partner Ecosystem, recognizing the leading security solutions that combine with Sysdig to help customers prioritize and respond to critical security risks.
Nokod Security announced the general availability of the Nokod Security Platform.
Drata has acquired oak9, a cloud native security platform, and released a new capability in beta to seamlessly bring continuous compliance into the software development lifecycle.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Q, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ internal data.
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the latest version of the enterprise Linux platform.
ActiveState unveiled Get Current, Stay Current (GCSC) – a continuous code refactoring service that deals with breaking changes so enterprises can stay current with the pace of open source.
Lineaje released Open-Source Manager (OSM), a solution to bring transparency to open-source software components in applications and proactively manage and mitigate associated risks.
Synopsys announced the availability of Polaris Assist, an AI-powered application security assistant on the Synopsys Polaris Software Integrity Platform®.
Backslash Security announced the findings of its GPT-4 developer simulation exercise, designed and conducted by the Backslash Research Team, to identify security issues associated with LLM-generated code. The Backslash platform offers several core capabilities that address growing security concerns around AI-generated code, including open source code reachability analysis and phantom package visibility capabilities.
Azul announced that Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul’s cloud analytics solution -- which provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to dramatically boost developer productivity -- now supports Oracle JDK and any OpenJDK-based JVM (Java Virtual Machine) from any vendor or distribution.