Slides share to get started on vendor analysis for APM

1. Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Summary Notes

2. What is APM?
Application Performance Monitoring is the monitoring of availability
and performance of software applications from the end user
perspective.
Many APM tools can also prevent problems from occurring by
detecting early warning signs of issues and proactively monitoring
resources for contention.
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3. Typical Goals
• Proactively determine the health of production environments ahead of
customer calls
• If we did have outages, have highly visible cross application data to
correlate the events and incidents to quickly pinpoint the root cause of
issues for a quick recovery
• Determine if we are nearing the capacity for our critical applications
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4. Evaluators & Methodology
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Vendor Discovery
The Application Performance Management (APM) landscape was reviewed from the industry and internal
candidates. The output of this step was a list of well suited potential candidates. IT Leaders are chosen to be
evaluators. They vetted the application and provided feedback via an an APM scoring matrix and written
commentary. Stakeholders were kept informed of the process as it progressed.
Vendor Short list
The vendors received Use Case scenarios as requirements. Some vendors will self-select out of the exercise.
Others will be eliminated due to a lack of a single source of tools and an inability to complete a deep-dive
down to the code level across an agnostic set of tools. The output of this step is a short-listed list of high
quality vendors.
Vendor PoC
A technical Proof of Concept in a test environment for the short list, after appropriate legal and technical
reviews.
APM Draft recommendations
A draft recommendations report is created, incorporating all preliminary findings from the evaluators including
budgetary numbers.
Stakeholder Approval
Presentation for approval to stakeholders.

5. Example Roles & Use Cases
 (Tool Power User) Installation, Configuration and Adoption will be easy and of low
overhead
 (Operations Analyst) Visibility into server performance will be transparent and
correlated to application events and alerts
 (Application Developer, Application Support) Visibility into application performance,
platforms, and usage trends will be transparent with the ability to set baselines,
thresholds and alerts. Also, have the ability to map and trace dynamic environments
on physical or virtualized servers or in the cloud
 (Application Developer) I want the ability to complete workload planning (capability
and availability)
 (DevOps Engineer) Quickly assess the quality and effectiveness of releases and if
necessary, have the ability to detect and diagnose issues
 (Application Developer) Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Monitoring for
major web browsers and mobile application monitoring
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6. Example General Findings
• All short-list candidates will greatly improve our application monitoring capabilities,
one tool best fits the requirements.
• Tool selection doesn’t mean success and the roll-out plan is outside of this discussion.
• The short-list candidates are not the APM tools of the past. While we have all had a
good chuckle about vendor claims of low overhead, set-up and configuration our own
internal experience has initially validate that set-up can be easy.
• Short-list candidates are similarly priced with better pricing for a 3-year term.
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7. Potential Candidate Vendors*
• AppDynamics APM Tool
• Dell Software
• Dynatrace APM Tool
• Microsoft Software
• New Relic APM Tool
* Alphabetical ordering
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