DEVOPSdigest

As enterprises embrace the DevOps philosophy, and the coalescence of the Development and Operations continues, I foresee the conditions ripening to foster innovative methods of making application performance better and code deployments smoother. To me, the argument that system monitoring is just a “nice to have” and not really a core requirement for operational readiness dissipates quickly when a critical application goes down with no warning.

Application Performance Management (APM) has been bred with all the right elements to give us the insights we need to see the health of our applications. Similar to your most trusted watch dog, it alerts us to anomalies when events occur, providing awareness to the environment that only they can observe.

This is where APM can bridge the gap between Development and Operations, supporting the entire application lifecycle. There are certain APM principles that weave themselves in and through the DevOps philosophy that create a fabric of continuous improvement. The end-user-experience (EUE) is one of these threads, becoming the yardstick by which to measure application performance.

Development and Operations view APM in a slightly different light, largely because it is a concept that consists of multiple complementary approaches for addressing issues surrounding application performance. Understanding the different requirements for Development and Operations is one of the key elements needed for APM adoption to take off in both areas.

It is not necessarily the number of features or technical stamina of each monitoring tool to process large volumes of data that will make an APM implementation successful; it’s the choices you make in putting them together, creating an amplified feedback loop between Development and Operations (one of the core tenets of DevOps).

Larry Dragich is Director of Enterprise Application Services at the Auto Club Group and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

You can contact Larry on LinkedIn