The IoT is in position to become one of the greatest application performance management challenges faced by IT. APMdigest asked experts across the industry – including analysts, consultants and vendors – for their recommendations on how to ensure performance for IoT applications. Part 3 covers app design and development.

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 1

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 2

13. FLEXIBILITY

Your best bet when ensuring IoT performance is to design for flexibility. Don't get locked into any one specific vendor. The IoT landscape is not yet well-defined when it comes to standards, protocols, connectivity, security, and more. Prudent leaders expect that change will occur at some point. Consider the entire spectrum, from the sensors to the analytics platform. Your monitoring platform must be flexible enough to adapt quickly to new technologies and vendors as the market takes shape. For example, SNMP is not an IoT-friendly protocol. In order to monitor performance of a service, you'll need other hooks into the data. That's why – if you're designing your own IoTT services – you'll want to build performance telemeetry into the application from the get-go. Make it easy to publish usage, load, and other performance stats for consumption by any monitoring platform.
Antonio Piraino
CTO, ScienceLogic

Take a flexible, vendor-agnostic approach to application development. Creating IoT systems takes embedded development into a new level of complexity. To make it bearable, you want a verbose framework that has enough flexibility for arbitrary extendibility in terms of hardware, sensors or cloud providers — don't lock in too early with your software design. It's time to take "best software practices for re-usable code" back into action.
Tuukka Ahoniemi, PhD
Head of Strategy, Qt

14. FACE THE HARSH REALITY

Design for the harsh reality that "things" will experience so they can not only survive, but thrive when bad things happen. Bad things, such as extended loss of power or network connectivity, are to be expected and the IoT application must be able to gracefully deal with it.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

15. DESIGN FOR BANDWIDTH

The top way to ensure performance for the IoT is to understand round trip bandwidth constraints through practical experimentation and design to practical threshold to avoid a degraded user experience.
William C. Hurley
Senior Director of Enterprise Technology Solutions, Astadia

16. CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

You need to be able to quickly and reliably release changes to your IoT apps. Build a solid CI/CD pipeline to rapidly push out updates. You'll probably need it.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

17. PERFORMANCE TESTING

While you can't test every possible scenario, you must have a robust strategy to test your IoT application. Virtualization and infrastructure as code or "Things as Code" are strategies that can enable you to rapidly prove your application can handle a wide variety of real world conditions. Simply said, without virtualization and automated testing, your IoT effort will probably be DoA.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Performance test the "system" or "unit/device" as a standalone system. THEN, performance test the system as part of the larger IoT, or as we in Aerospace coined it, the "System of Systems." That's what IoT is: an interconnected web of systems that must perform under duress on a standalone basis, AND perform under duress as part of a much larger environment.
Dan Boutin
VP of Digital Strategy, SOASTA

18. SECURITY

Based on the IT Central Station traffic patterns, users seem to hold particular concern regarding the security within these networks.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

According to Gartner, the number of business-deployed IoT devices is going to double in the next three years. This will be a game changer for performance monitoring. Instead of servers and desktops, we'll be watching shipping containers, slot machines, or fuel pumps. IoT performance management will be more than just accounting for device or app availability and response time. IT teams need solutions to provide integrated insight into the communications of dynamic end points, to extract business data, and most importantly to stay on top of security issues. Already you're seeing DDoS attacks on IoT assets. These attacks are succeeding despite the fact that we have the forensic analysis capability to detect and mitigate the damage they cause. The key issue these days is industry education on the necessity of this capability, versus the old school view of security forensics as a luxury.
Douglas Roberts
VP and General Manager, Viavi Enterprise and Cloud Business Unit

Read Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 4, the final installment of the list, covering communication and the network.