Many years ago, your organization was experiencing serious problems with a key application. The business was at your throat, your engineers were up day and night trying to find the problems.
Your friendly software vendor, hearing of your troubles, introduced you to an APM sales engineer, who assured you he could find your issues quickly and easily using an APM tool.
Desperate for a solution, you ran a proof of concept, and sure enough, it became clear APM was something you needed.
After an implementation, your smart engineers used APM to find the problems, the problems were fixed, and everyone went back to Business As Usual.
Now, fast forward several years to today. Every year APM takes a significant amount from your budget. The "smart guys" that knew how to use the APM tool have moved on, to bigger and better things.
You know there is value in this APM stuff, but you don't feel you are getting the value from it that you should be.
Your software vendor has run "health checks" and upgrades that added new features, but your fundamental problems still remain.
How can I get value from my APM investment in a repeatable way?
Everyone tells me APM should make me more proactive, but how do I actually achieve it?
How do I get my App Support team to use this APM stuff without needing them to be APM "Rocket Scientists"?
Hi, I'm Duane Nielsen, Principle Consultant at CA Technologies
I've been an APM consultant at CA Technologies for many years, in many different geographies around the globe.
In this "Reactive to Proactive" blog series, my objective is to help you become a proactive APM organization, by building a simple, lightweight, yet comprehensive APM Strategy for your Enterprise.
The steps in my APM strategy cookbook are, at a high level...
Understand your key user workflows
The great thing about APM in general, is that allows you to directly measure the customer experience in business friendly terms. This allows you to easily align your APM strategy to your business goals.
Start by asking yourself a simple question...
What are the important things users do on our applications?
Important, in this context, could mean: revenue generating; linked to customer satisfaction; keeping the business "up at night", or simply politically important to your organization. Make a "top 3 list".
For example imagine a hypothetical online brokerage, the top 3 jobs might be..
- Sign up new online customers
- Log existing customers into the system
- Process customer stock trades
The reason I say "top 3" list and not "top 20", is that it's important not to try to "boil the ocean" on your first outing with proactive APM.
Try to narrow the list to the things that are absolutely business critical. Areas where you will make a big impact, and earn kudos in a short space of time. You can trade on that kudos later, to move ahead on that "top 20" list.
A word of warning, don't expect that everyone will run out and embrace a proactive APM strategy. Like any monitoring strategy, it will involve increased accountability for some, and increased standards in both development and operations. By limiting your scope to the transactions that matter the most to your business, it makes it clearer to management what the immediate benefits of proactive APM will be. Namely, better service levels in sensitive areas of your business. Don't dilute that message.
Next, go and watch users execute those important workflows. Become familiar with the workflows and the steps. Every important workflow will have key clicks where the systems "magic" happens. Identify and screenshot/document those clicks.
So for example, our online trading platform...
- Sign up new customers online
- Browse product catalog
- Select Product
- Collect Registration Details
- Verify and Create Account
- Log existing customers into the system
- Process customer stock trades
- Capture order
- Confirm order
Congratulations, you have just laid the foundation of your APM strategy. Simple wasn't it?
In the next post, I'll deal with one of the major challenges. How to take ownership of the customer experience and set (and sell the benefits of) performance targets.
Till then!
Duane