When is it too early to think about monitoring?
In a word, “NEVER.”
I’ve heard people say that they are super busy with production deployments and fast-moving projects. They haven’t had much time to think about a performance monitoring strategy for their new applications.
But waiting until your applications are already in production is a mistake. However, it’s one that you can avoid.
Develop, test and deploy your applications with monitoring already in place and save yourself a lot of headaches. Let me count the ways:
1. Using the same monitoring tools for both pre- and post-production
Obviously, you will be doing performance testing during development and QA. But if you use different tools before and after, you might get inconsistent results. And you’ll have to retrain the people that did the original testing on the new performance monitoring tools. After they’ve moved on to other projects.
Having a monitoring strategy in place ensures that people are using the same tools throughout the lifecycle. .So that you can expect consistent measurements and more efficient troubleshooting and response if necessary.
2. Monitoring – independent from administration – eases access and alleviates concerns
Many developers need access to performance metrics during testing and often that means providing administrative access to middleware platforms to get those metrics.
When you’ve implemented an independent monitoring solution then developers can self-service their performance monitoring needs without worrying about providing administrative access.
3. Monitoring best practices implemented at design-time means less effort at run-time
Correlation of metrics between related technologies is what allows you to see things in context. For instance, show me all the servers that support a particular application. That's significantly easier than wading through 1000’s of servers trying to figure out which ones support my “banking” application. This is especially helpful when time is of the essence. But how does your monitoring system know which instances are related?
Well, you could map it manually, often using naming conventions for your services and engines. The better you stick to well-defined naming conventions, the easier it is. This is another reason why including monitoring requirements in your application building process will pay dividends down the road. Because “automatically” is so much easier than “manually”.
4. Capacity Planning is easier if you’ve been collecting performance data all along
If your business is successful, your apps will get busier and you’ll need to ask yourself if you have enough capacity for future growth? Of course, it’s hard to answer that question if you have no baseline data.
However, capturing performance data from the start enables you to see the resource usage trends over time. Correlate that to expected traffic growth for your application and you'll be on stable ground as you analyze your resource requirements for the next 6-12 months.
5. You don’t have to worry about running out of steam
For a lot of companies, once an application is written, people celebrate and move on. Things that you promise you’ll get to later – never seem to be a priority anymore. Unless, of course, you are hit with a severity one outage and then all heck breaks loose. Then people start panicking because there is no visibility into what is breaking down and where.
Building monitoring requirements into the application development cycle ensure that these things are not forgotten in the hustle and bustle of the next project. In fact, some of our customers will not sign off on a project unless monitoring is ready to go BEFORE moving into production. They make it a priority from the start so that they don’t have to struggle for resources AFTER everybody thinks they are done and move on to something else.
So, the next time somebody asks you about your monitoring strategy for your new apps, instead of saying “I’m too busy to think about it right now,” you should say, “I’m way ahead of you”.
David Hickman is in Product Marketing at SL Corporation.
The Latest
I've had the opportunity to work with a number of organizations embarking on their AIOps journey. I always advise them to start by evaluating their needs and the possibilities AIOps can bring to them through five different levels of AIOps maturity. This is a strategic approach that allows enterprises to achieve complete automation for long-term success ...
Sumo Logic recently commissioned an independent market research study to understand the industry momentum behind continuous intelligence — and the necessity for digital organizations to embrace a cloud-native, real-time continuous intelligence platform to support the speed and agility of business for faster decision-making, optimizing security, driving new innovation and delivering world-class customer experiences. Some of the key findings include ...
When it comes to viruses, it's typically those of the computer/digital variety that IT is concerned about. But with the ongoing pandemic, IT operations teams are on the hook to maintain business functions in the midst of rapid and massive change. One of the biggest challenges for businesses is the shift to remote work at scale. Ensuring that they can continue to provide products and services — and satisfy their customers — against this backdrop is challenging for many ...
Teams tasked with developing and delivering software are under pressure to balance the business imperative for speed with high customer expectations for quality. In the course of trying to achieve this balance, engineering organizations rely on a variety of tools, techniques and processes. The 2020 State of Software Quality report provides a snapshot of the key challenges organizations encounter when it comes to delivering quality software at speed, as well as how they are approaching these hurdles. This blog introduces its key findings ...
For IT teams, run-the-business, commodity areas such as employee help desks, device support and communication platforms are regularly placed in the crosshairs for cost takeout, but these areas are also highly visible to employees. Organizations can improve employee satisfaction and business performance by building unified functions that are measured by employee experience rather than price. This approach will ultimately fund transformation, as well as increase productivity and innovation ...
In the agile DevOps framework, there is a vital piece missing; something that previous approaches to application development did well, but has since fallen by the wayside. That is, the post-delivery portion of the toolchain. Without continuous cloud optimization, the CI/CD toolchain still produces massive inefficiencies and overspend ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has exponentially accelerated digital transformation projects. To better understand where IT professionals are turning for help, we analyzed the online behaviors of IT decision-makers. Our research found an increase in demand for resources related to APM, microservices and dependence on cloud services ...
The rush to the public cloud has now slowed as organizations realized that it is not a "one size fits all" solution. The main issue is the lack of deep visibility into the performance of applications provided by the host. Our own research has recently revealed that 32% of public cloud resources are currently under-utilized, and without proper direction and guidance, this will remain the case ...
The global shift to working from home (WFH) enforced by COVID-19 stay-at-home orders has had a massive impact on everyone's working lives, not just in the way they remotely interact with their teams and IT systems, but also in how they spend their working days. With both governments and businesses committed to slowly opening up offices, it's increasingly clear that a high prevalence of remote work will continue throughout 2020 and beyond. This situation begets important questions ...
