A recent visit to Wikipedia’s page on Application Performance Management (APM) was disappointing. It featured a boxes-in-boxes diagram so often used for enterprise software illustrations. The nineteen citations go back to the “early” date of 2010. There is no mention of the history of APM.
If there is a lack of history around APM, however, we can learn much from other industries. Take the hospitality industry. Like our online apps, a hotel is open 24/7/365. While customers must check in and out within windows, “transactions” are otherwise supposed to be quick and asynchronous. If a hotelier is blocked for too long handling a single customer, the overall responsiveness of the hotel can suffer, especially if it’s “single threaded”.
So how do hotels train themselves and equip their staff to provide top quality customer experience?
In 1846, central heating was introduced[1]to hotels, and a string of innovations we now take for granted followed: elevators, electric lighting, in-room telephones, and free television. Around the time of free television, innovation began to center around high technology: electronic point-of-sale, in-room checkout, internet reservations, and Wi-Fi.
Joseph Longo, a winning hotelier, dictated that all guests feel welcome, by providing them with “the basics of hospitality: a comfortable room, exceptional food, and a friendly staff to serve them.” No mention of technology here.
And yet, it is critical to Longo’s recipe. Computers have changed the way we live, and our notion of comfort has changed with it. Hospitality used to mean a warm smile from helpful staff. Now, a guest would gladly just walk into the hotel, head to her room, and let her pre-assigned door scan a barcode off her phone. Broken internet? Close the hotel!
Technology is not an end to the hotel industry, and may not be an end to any industry save the technology industry itself.
Almost every APM product on the market is designed and engineered to make the life of the “hotel staff” [IT and DevOps] more efficient. This may initially be the right move while the technology is proving itself out, but eventually the winning products are those that fulfill Longo’s prime directive: making the guests comfortable. How can APM help do this?
Soon, the APM community will stop its primitive, ever escalating quest for more data about server-side componentry. It will shift its focus from metric malaise to comprehensive characterization of the entire end user experience. Call it the “hero’s journey” of internet end users; it takes a path into the abyss, and on to transformation.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/americanangel/introduction-to-hotel-management