Presented at Gluecon 2014 by James Urquhart and Rob Dickinson of Dell. "Mining" for application performance "gold" is harder than ever before. Applications are becoming parts of larger complex systems, and developers need to understand how the system behaves as much as how each application behaves. Following transaction details is an excellent way of monitoring application performance in these systems, and triggering automation activities such as autoscaling and recovery.

1. Miningfor Gold
How Browser,Network,andApplicationTraceMash-UpsCanBoost
ApplicationPerformance

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IntroducingDellSoftware
• QuestSoftware, Enstratius are the foundation
•Part of “World’s Largest Startup” with 110k people
•Sponsors at GlueCon and Velocity
•6 employees in Boulder (shameless hometown plug)

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“Mining” for performance“gold”is moredifficult
than it everwas.

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Our “units of deployment”may begetting a bit
simpler
But our systems aregetting much more
complex…

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We used to shoot for stability in a controlled
environment
But wenow shoot for resiliencyin an ever
changing environment

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How do we handle thiscomplexity?
Observe,Measure and Filter
Understand Intrinsic
Latencies
Understand the
Transaction Path
Understand User Behavior
Understand Resource
Contention
Improve Logical Complexity Tune, Balance, Scale
How are your tools andtechniques helping you dothis today?

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Applications: Definedby Infrastructure?
CDN 3rd party
Challenges of Scale, Co-location, Tenancy, Cost

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Applications Should be Definedby Activity
How doyoutroubleshootandassessproblemsin complex dynamicenvironments? How areactivities
identified andunderstood?

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System Complexity is Emergent/Entropic
WhataboutNoSQL?RoR?Ansible?AWS?(ormagic unicorns?)
Complexityis linkedwith marketsuccess, is driven bycustomers,contributors,competitors,investors,
partners,even time itself
Complexity doesn’t really fade,
but takes onnew forms

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CompleteDiscrete Transaction Traces
• Enduser data(navigation timing andfull content)
• Transactionpathandparametersandtiming
• Relatedbackendresources(databases,queues)
• Full detailofusersession in context
Web
server
App
server
DB
server
End users Internet Firewall
Traceand mergebeforeaggregation
Related Infrastructure

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WhyDiscrete Traces?

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Response TimeBreakdown

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Response TimeAnalysis (multi-dimensional)

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So, your next question shouldbe“IfI’m analyzing
all thisdata in a constantly changing
environment,how the heckdo Ikeepup?”

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Answer?:
Automation

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The only way to ensure
resilienceat scaleis to
makeeachagent (or cluster
of agents) as“self-resilient”
as possible.

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In an automated system, provisioning, scaling,
failure tolerance, and disaster recovery are
different names for the same workflows
• The trigger for the workflow is the
distinguishing characteristic
• All are executions of the same workflows
addressing insufficient or excess computing
resources
• All tend to focus on at the workload level

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Anything you can monitor can serve as a
trigger for a scaling workflow
• Raw resource utilization
• Basic application metrics
• Understanding the transaction path

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Aggregated and/or discrete
transaction data can help identify the
proper workload to
scale/recover/etc.*
*No way of predicting exactly which measure
is best for all time

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Example:
Uses aggregate order
rate for specific movies
by region to make scaling
decisions.
What scales determined
by APM data.

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Example:
Several financial services
firms combine market
trading volume with
transaction volume to
determine when to scale.

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How do we handle thiscomplexity?
Observe,Measure and Filter
Understand Intrinsic
Latencies
Understand the
Transaction Path
Understand User Behavior
Understand Resource
Contention
Improve Logical Complexity Tune, Balance, Scale
How are your tools andtechniques helping you dothis today?

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Questions and
Answers