CA Wily Tuesday Tip by Hallett German, Sr. Support Engineer for 4/13/2013
When I was an architect, I would include the following as customer deliverables at the end of each engagement trip report:
- Create an APM Monitoring Strategy and an Application Roadmap for APM CE to monitor applications.
However, I am not sure if any customers actually followed through on this. (One did tell me that they already had an application monitoring strategy. Another was proud to mention that they did not.)
This article will deal with the monitoring strategy and next month will cover the application roadmap.
Wikipedia defines strategy "as a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty." That seems to be a great fit to the application performance market where uncertainty and change are the only givens.
So what are some guidelines for this strategy document?
1) It should be a living document. It should be reviewed and updated either quarterly or monthly.
2) it should be high-level and no more than eight to ten pages.
3) It should be easily accessible and highly visible throughout the APM Support organization.
4) It should be flexible to cover changes in an organization.(This would include - organizational changes such as mergers, spin-offs, consolidations, responsibility changes etc.
- application changes such as new application implementations or old application removals.
- monitoring responsibilities in a federated environment. (What will your organization will monitor versus your business partners?)
- Changes in technology (such as the migration of data centers to the cloud, big data, etc.)
5) It should have buy-in from application monitor stakeholders such as the application owners, application customers (when appropriate), and the application monitor organization among others
What would such a document include?:
1) Vision for Application Monitoring
2) Key Objectives of Application Monitoring
3) Key Metrics for measuring Application Health and Transaction Success.
4) Organizations involved
5) Applications being monitored
6) Solutions being used. This includes vendors, strengths and weaknesses, key components, integrations, and other information.
7) Six month- 1 year projects and goals
8) Key documents for further information
- Vendor manuals
- Policies
- Best Practices
- Glossary
- Network setup
-Overview of key applications
- Run books
These are the discussion questions for this article:
1. Do you have an application monitoring strategy document. If not, why not?
2. If yes:
- Who maintains the document
- Is there a process to get the document reviewed and updated?
3. Do you have anything that you wish to share about this topic? I would really like to hear what is working or not for you.