The Secret to a Good Holiday Season - Today, Cyber Monday and Beyond

Learn more about Broadcom

If you're the type of person that puts off holiday shopping until the last minute, Christmas 2012 may still seem like forever away, but September 16 marked 100 days until the biggest retail holiday of the year.

ShopperTrak predicts US retail sales will rise 3.3 percent this year and retailers are planning robust hiring to keep up with demand. This means the time is NOW to have your business-critical applications and systems ready to handle the rush.

Of course, it's not just retailers that have to ensure critical systems run smoothly, as banks, transportation and other peripheral industries must be prepared as well. Package carriers like UPS and FedEx might be in the best shape after getting a pre-holiday test run with the September 21 release of Apple's iPhone 5.

If you're in one on these holiday-impacted businesses, how do you make sure that the planning you’ve done all year is ready to handle the load?

First, leverage your existing production Application Performance Management (APM) system in the pre-production environment to monitor your load testing activities. Load testing alone can help tell you in black and white that your systems can handle X load, but adding APM to the mix will help you see the gray areas.

For instance, say transactions are going through, but taking 10 seconds where they should be taking one second. This slow down might be caused by a slow link to a backend database or mainframe system. (Yep, it's 2012 and mainframes still play a major role in Christmas shopping.) Using your APM system in pre-production testing also helps ensure your monitoring setup is also ready to handle the load when the holiday rush truly begins.

Still have doubts your IT systems can handle the rush? Use a capacity management tool to run a few what/if scenarios against your current production environment. Some systems can capitalize on performance data from APM systems to better model what future performance might look like. Such a capacity management/planning exercise could point to simple changes to the current environment that would allow your systems to better handle the load with minimal impact to the bottom line.

Monitoring Outside the Firewall

Obviously, now and when the shoppers kick things into high gear on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an APM system must be used internally to monitor key business services and end-user experience. As system traffic increases, being able to monitor all end-user transactions is critical to spotting performance issues before they impact customers.

But today's revenue-generating systems also need to be monitored externally as well to ensure a quality end-user experience. There are two reasons to add an external monitoring capability:

1. Today’s Web applications are pulling data from a mosaic of services and rely on delivery systems beyond IT's control. By using a monitoring system outside the firewall, you can get the same perspective of performance as your customers. This view will show if a third-party system or regional Internet slowdown is causing issues, allowing you to take appropriate action.

2. Mobile is going to play an increased role this Christmas season. IMRG Capgemini Quarterly Benchmarking Index forecasts that 30% of website visits will be via a mobile device. An external monitoring system that uses real-browser technology to test systems using the rendering engines of traditional desktop and mobile browsers can help ensure you're delivering a great user experience to all customers hitting your site to shop, track a shipment or check a bank balance.

Beyond the 2012 holiday season, the lessons learned and data collected can help influence system readiness for the 2013 holidays.

All that APM data you've been collecting for the next few months doesn't have to go to waste. Use it to build real-world testing scenarios for your next generation of applications and services. Such real-world data will allow you to better model your testing and quality assurance systems as well as capacity planning exercises, enabling your organization to support continued business growth now and in the future.

ABOUT Jason Meserve

Jason Meserve has been working in high-tech for over 15 years, and is currently a Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies where he focuses on Service Assurance solutions such as Application Performance Management. He built his tech resume in the 10 years he spent as a journalist at Network World, where he created everything from articles, features, blogs, videos and podcasts. Meserve has also held marketing and editorial positions at Constant Contact and Application Development Trends.

Related Links:

www.ca.com/apm

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The Secret to a Good Holiday Season - Today, Cyber Monday and Beyond

Learn more about Broadcom

If you're the type of person that puts off holiday shopping until the last minute, Christmas 2012 may still seem like forever away, but September 16 marked 100 days until the biggest retail holiday of the year.

ShopperTrak predicts US retail sales will rise 3.3 percent this year and retailers are planning robust hiring to keep up with demand. This means the time is NOW to have your business-critical applications and systems ready to handle the rush.

Of course, it's not just retailers that have to ensure critical systems run smoothly, as banks, transportation and other peripheral industries must be prepared as well. Package carriers like UPS and FedEx might be in the best shape after getting a pre-holiday test run with the September 21 release of Apple's iPhone 5.

If you're in one on these holiday-impacted businesses, how do you make sure that the planning you’ve done all year is ready to handle the load?

First, leverage your existing production Application Performance Management (APM) system in the pre-production environment to monitor your load testing activities. Load testing alone can help tell you in black and white that your systems can handle X load, but adding APM to the mix will help you see the gray areas.

For instance, say transactions are going through, but taking 10 seconds where they should be taking one second. This slow down might be caused by a slow link to a backend database or mainframe system. (Yep, it's 2012 and mainframes still play a major role in Christmas shopping.) Using your APM system in pre-production testing also helps ensure your monitoring setup is also ready to handle the load when the holiday rush truly begins.

Still have doubts your IT systems can handle the rush? Use a capacity management tool to run a few what/if scenarios against your current production environment. Some systems can capitalize on performance data from APM systems to better model what future performance might look like. Such a capacity management/planning exercise could point to simple changes to the current environment that would allow your systems to better handle the load with minimal impact to the bottom line.

Monitoring Outside the Firewall

Obviously, now and when the shoppers kick things into high gear on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an APM system must be used internally to monitor key business services and end-user experience. As system traffic increases, being able to monitor all end-user transactions is critical to spotting performance issues before they impact customers.

But today's revenue-generating systems also need to be monitored externally as well to ensure a quality end-user experience. There are two reasons to add an external monitoring capability:

1. Today’s Web applications are pulling data from a mosaic of services and rely on delivery systems beyond IT's control. By using a monitoring system outside the firewall, you can get the same perspective of performance as your customers. This view will show if a third-party system or regional Internet slowdown is causing issues, allowing you to take appropriate action.

2. Mobile is going to play an increased role this Christmas season. IMRG Capgemini Quarterly Benchmarking Index forecasts that 30% of website visits will be via a mobile device. An external monitoring system that uses real-browser technology to test systems using the rendering engines of traditional desktop and mobile browsers can help ensure you're delivering a great user experience to all customers hitting your site to shop, track a shipment or check a bank balance.

Beyond the 2012 holiday season, the lessons learned and data collected can help influence system readiness for the 2013 holidays.

All that APM data you've been collecting for the next few months doesn't have to go to waste. Use it to build real-world testing scenarios for your next generation of applications and services. Such real-world data will allow you to better model your testing and quality assurance systems as well as capacity planning exercises, enabling your organization to support continued business growth now and in the future.

ABOUT Jason Meserve

Jason Meserve has been working in high-tech for over 15 years, and is currently a Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies where he focuses on Service Assurance solutions such as Application Performance Management. He built his tech resume in the 10 years he spent as a journalist at Network World, where he created everything from articles, features, blogs, videos and podcasts. Meserve has also held marketing and editorial positions at Constant Contact and Application Development Trends.

Related Links:

www.ca.com/apm

Hot Topics

The Latest

When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

From Cleanup to Prevention: The Future of Cloud-Native Cost Optimization

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

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The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

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TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...