Book description
The objective of APM Best Practices is to establish reliable Application Performance Management practices—to demonstrate value, to do it quickly, and to adapt to the client circumstances. Balancing long-term goals with short-term deliverables, but without compromising usefulness or correctness. The successful strategy is to establish a few reasonable goals, achieve them quickly, and then iterate over the same topics two more times, with each successive iteration expanding the Skills and Capabilities of the APM team. This strategy is referred to as "Good, Better, Best". The expanding capabilities of the team are immortalized as milestones towards achieving a Catalog of Services that become the interface with your application and business sponsors.
The Application Performance Monitoring marketplace is very focused on ease of installation, rapid time to usefulness, and overall ease of use. But these worthy platitudes do not really address the Application Performance Management processes that ensure that you will deploy effectively, synergize on QA test plans, triage accurately, and encourage collaboration across the application lifecycle that ultimately lowers overall application cost and ensures a quality user experience. These are also fine platitudes but these are the ones that are of interest to your application sponsors. These are the ones for which you need to show value. So this book employs this iterative approach, adapted pragmatically for the realities of your organizational and operational constraints, to realize a future state that your sponsors will find useful, predictable and manageable—and something that they will want to fund. In the meantime, you will learn the useful techniques needed to set up and maintain a useful performance management system utilizing best practices regardless of the software provider(s).
Table of contents
- Copyright
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
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1. Getting Started with APM
- 1.1. The Challenge
- 1.2. Reference Architecture
- 1.3. The Five APM Competencies
- 1.4. The First Meeting
- 1.5. Meeting Themes
- 1.6. Summary
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I. Planning
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2. Business Justification
- 2.1. Justification Is Not ROI
- 2.2. Entry Points
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2.3. Initiative Themes
- 2.3.1. Availability vs. Performance Monitoring
- 2.3.2. Resolving Application Incidents and Outages
- 2.3.3. Improving Application Software Quality
- 2.3.4. Pre-production Readiness and Deployment
- 2.3.5. Managing Service Level Agreements
- 2.3.6. Enhancing the Value of the Monitoring Tool Investment
- 2.3.7. Proactive Monitoring
- 2.3.8. Trending and Analysis
- 2.3.9. Single-View of Service Performance (Dashboards)
- 2.4. Summary
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3. Assessments
- 3.1. Overview
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3.2. Assessment Dimensions
- 3.2.1. Application Survey
- 3.2.2. Skills and Processes
- 3.2.3. Incidents
- 3.2.4. Stakeholder Interviews
- 3.2.5. Detailed Findings (Alternate Technique)
- 3.2.6. Solution Sizing
- 3.3. Summarizing Your Findings and Recommendations
- 3.4. Conclusion
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4. Staffing and Responsibilities
- 4.1. The Staffing Question
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4.2. Staffing an APM Initiative
- 4.2.1. What Staffing Is Appropriate for APM Success?
- 4.2.2. The FTE Approach
- 4.2.3. Evolving Your Organization's Use of APM
- 4.2.4. Building a Scalable Monitoring Organization
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4.2.5. Real-World Staffing Evolution Scenarios?
- 4.2.5.1. First APM, Accepted but Constrained Budget
- 4.2.5.2. Significant APM, Committed but Has Gaps with Current Practice
- 4.2.5.3. Significant Existing APM, Recommitted but Constrained Budget
- 4.2.5.4. Significant Existing APM, Recommitted and Budgeted for APM Practice
- 4.2.5.5. Significant Existing APM, Retrenching, Maintain Existing Footprint Only
- 4.3. Summary
- 5. APM Patterns
- 6. The Pilot Evaluation
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2. Business Justification
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II. Implementation
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7. Deployment Strategies
- 7.1. Stand-Alone
- 7.2. Phased Deployments
- 7.3. Realizing QA and Triage
- 7.4. Deployment Necessities
- 7.5. Postproduction Review
- 7.6. Install/Update Validation
- 7.7. Updates
- 7.8. Alert Integration
- 7.9. Summary
- 8. Essential Processes
- 9. Essential Service Capabilities
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7. Deployment Strategies
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III. Practitioners
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10. Solution Sizing
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10.1. Kick Off Meeting
- 10.1.1. Solution Architecture
- 10.1.2. Metrics Storage Sizing
- 10.1.3. Deployment Strategy
- 10.1.4. Monitoring the Metrics Storage
- 10.1.5. Communicating Sizing Results and Recommendations
- 10.1.6. Process Considerations
- 10.1.7. Deployment Survey and Sizing
- 10.1.8. Solution Certification
- 10.2. Competency
- 10.3. Artifacts
- 10.4. Summary
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10.1. Kick Off Meeting
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11. Load Generation
- 11.1. Kick Off Meeting
- 11.2. Process
- 11.3. Competency
- 11.4. Artifacts
- 11.5. Summary
- 12. Baselines
- 13. The Application Audit
- 14. Triage with Single Metrics
- 15. Triage with Baselines
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16. Triage with Trends
- 16.1. Kick Off Meeting
- 16.2. Process
- 16.3. Competency
- 16.4. Artifacts
- 16.5. Summary
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17. Firefighting and Critical Situations
- 17.1. Kick Off Meeting
- 17.2. Process
- 17.3. Competency
- 17.4. Summary
-
10. Solution Sizing
Product information
- Title: APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management
- Author(s):
- Release date: January 2010
- Publisher(s): Apress
- ISBN: 9781430231417
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