Successful use of APM doesn’t happen by accident or wishful thinking. You need to learn specific tasks and capabilities and evolve in the course of becoming competent with the technology, as well as becoming savvy with the philosophy and lifestyle of performance management. We have been validating analytic techniques for APM data and have found that using KPIs directly from your managed environment has a distinct advantage versus a generic set of metrics. This ensures that your analytics are farming meaningful data, and not getting distracted with excessive volumes of spurious metrics. It is a technique that you can apply today, as you begin planning for your upgrade tomorrow.
In a webcast on May 29th 2013, CA Technologies Mike Sydor, Senior Engineering Services Architect, and author of “APM Best Practices” used this content to discuss how we identify and harness KPIs to make sense of your APM "big data", and how these techniques will help to prepare for your upgrade to the new features and functionality with upcoming APM release and its tight integration with Advanced Behavior Analytics (ABA).
Listen to the webcast replay http://goo.gl/PZwTeu
Learn more at http://www.ca.com/apm
14. What is an Application?
Front-ends
– Browser? Webservice? Messaging?
Back-ends
– Databases Webservices Messaging Mainframes Trading_Partners
Muck-in-the-Middle
– Software quality, stability and scalability
- We want to identify KPIs for each of these elements
– - helps us build a useful dashboard for Operations
– - helps expose with the resources are really doing
– - helps us define acceptance criteria, to act proactively
– - helps us to triage really effectively
19. Create a Simple Alert, Find Restart and threshold
(MetricCount)
“UP” – but not actually doing anything!!!
20. Understanding Your Environment
Identify the KPIs
– Availability
Agent ConnectionStatus
Number Live Metrics (Metric Count)
– Performance
High Volume components with significant response time
– NOT “Top 10 Response Time”
– Capacity
Highest Volume Components
Don’t Wait for Production!!!
– Make it part of your pre-production review
– Manage the application lifecycle by trending KPIs
21. Good Better (additional) Best (additional)
Stalls Availability – Connected
Status
Errors
GC Settings Availability - Metric
Count
Key Resource
Performance
Concurrency Suspect Performance Business Transaction
Survey
Memory Management
(graph)
Suspect Capacity
Platform
Coarse information
..but not really APM
Application, Transactions, Resources
The APM Advantage
KPI Evolution
22. What’s New in CA APM 9.6
Simplified, automated, and built on CA APM strengths.
Seamless Mainframe Awareness
Faster, Easier APM
• Intelligent Deep Transaction Trace is now dynamic, automated, and requires less developer
involvement for deep dives into apps supporting the transactions
• Simplified Triage with easier drill down with Application Triage Map including Socket Grouping
• Improved response times with software based Transaction Impact Monitor (end-user experience)
• Expanding APMs scope with Java 7 EM & Agents
• Increased insight by adding DB2 details to transaction traces
• Greater awareness with CA SYSVIEW MQ alerts & complete status in APM
• Driving further cross enterprise depth with CTG traces to fully expand backend calls
• Other mainframe based enhancements
23. Preparing to Upgrade
HealthCheck the existing cluster prior to any upgrade
Good:
– - Do a clean install of the APM Cluster, alongside of the existing cluster version.
- Manually duplicate management modules, domains.xml, etc.
- Bring down the old version, then bring up the new
Better:
– - Install the new version in a separate environment, reduced size
– - migrate a few applications to the new environment for validation
– - upgrade the primary environment after validation achieved
Best:
– - Install a new GOLD environment in production, separate from original cluster
– - migrate agents, as schedules permit, until original cluster may be
decommissioned
– - this provides an opportunity to introduce pre-production review and generally
correct any bad deployment habits
24. Resources
APM Community Site (
https://communities.ca.com/web/ca-wily-global-user-community
– - Cookbook: APM HealthCheck
– - Understanding Which Metrics Matter (KPI discussion)
– - Cookbook: Application Audit
- more details on the baseline techniques and process
APM best practices – Realizing Application Performance Management
– available on Amazon.com and Apress.com
- Baselines, Test Plans, App Audits, Triage, Firefighting
- Organizational Models, Service Catalogs
APM Web Page : Ca.com/apm