Application Performance Monitoring and Management (APM) tools are nothing new with many tools being around for a decade or so. However it still surprises me to see that many developers and application support teams are not using an APM solution to solve application issues. In a recent survey conducted by Dzone on Performance and Monitoring, whose primary audience is developers, found that 93% of those surveyed use application logs to find the root cause of application issues.
Honestly, this is really no surprise as developers depend on, and are the main “authors” of log files. Do log files provide enough timely information to quickly and easily solve application issues? Maybe in certain instances yes, but in other examples there may be a need to have detailed insights into the application and its relevant components. When surveyed “how long it takes to solve performance problems (from detection of the problem to having a fix committed to production)”, almost 55% of those respondent’s said it takes less than a week. Less than a week seems way too long which makes me wonder, if developers have sufficient information to quickly resolve application issues and gain enough insight into customer experience, could they release and innovate faster than without an APM solution?
The Blame Game
When application issues do occur, we frequently hear about the “blame game” or trying to figure out “who was the culprit” and too often this results in many late nights trying to figure out if it was the network, VM, container, cloud provider or application code. In the survey, when asked “which areas of your technology stack tend to have the most frequent performance issues”, the top area was application code followed by database then network. Surprisingly when asked “when was the last time you had to solve a performance problem in your software”, almost 32% said this week.
The survey also revealed that besides the network, the second most challenging area to fix performance issue was in the application code. But what if developers had production level performance data about how their code was performing? Or better yet had detailed diagnostic information at every stage of the application. They could validate builds and possibly shorten development, innovate faster and produce higher quality applications.
Developers Crave Information
We live in an age of readily accessible information and yet when it comes to monitoring and performance data only a few have access. Why is this? Is it because the tools are too complex? Is it because there might be sensitive information being collected? Over the years, many monitoring tools have been redesigned adding in role based views with simplified dashboards and workflows. This allows for a democratization of APM meaning that it’s no longer a tool for the few experts but should be used by variety of users, such as help desk first level support analysts, middleware tier support and even database administrators. But do you give developers access to this same performance information?
A few years ago, I worked with a development team that was given access to the same monitoring tools as the app support team, and they were amazed with the amount of insights the tools provided which allowed them to not only solve app issues faster but see how customers were using their code. They understood how their code really worked, and felt validation that what they built met their customers’ needs or in some cases the competitive drive to build something better. We often times talk about DevOps but may not understand the impact to our customer experience and the satisfaction Developers and IT operators have towards successfully working to a common goal.
Studies have found that employees that have access to information to do their jobs tend to be happier and more productive. In essence, “Happy Developers/operations = Happy Customers”. The traditional APM tools are no longer just for IT operation teams but for development teams looking to gain better insights into application performance and customer experience. However how we consume and understand this data may vary from role to role. In order to be successful an APM tool must present the data in a vocabulary that person understands whether it's a developer, first level support analyst or the business analyst.
CA Application Performance Management
In a previous blog I spoke about perspectives, which gives each user the ability to pivot information based on attributes or descriptors that best define how they want to slice and dice the data. This ability allow each user to view the data in the “vocabulary” which they understand. Almost like an application translator. If you haven’t seen CA APM 10 and perspectives I’d encourage you to view this video.
Also Developers require performance details down to the code level, which is key to validating user experiences, quality and improving functional areas of their design. This is especially important in mobile applications where users expect a five star experience and anything other than that can directly hurt your brands reputation. With CA Mobile App Analytics (MAA) developers can view detailed analytics on crashes, have code-level visibility into root causes, and insight into end-user experience through video session playback. With this tool, developers can prioritize issues by assessing impact on user experience and revenue and capture device usage metrics such as CPU, memory and frame rate.
Try it today!