Listen to the recorded webinar here: http://info.appdynamics.com/webinars.html?eventid=1022540&key=7E90DB53838CC4874814EACA25AB9619

1. Top 5 Java Performance Metrics,
Tips & Tricks
Steven Haines, Java Expert and Author

2. Agenda
• Introduction
• Top 5 Performance Metrics to capture in Java
applications
• Business Transactions
• External Dependencies
• Caching Strategy
• Garbage Collection
• Application Topology
• Performance Monitoring Tips & Tricks
• Questions and Answers

3. About the Speakers
Steven Haines
• Author of two Java programming books and a
Java performance management book, over 500
articles, and a dozen white papers
• Former Java instructor at the University of
California, Irvine (UCI)
• Spent the better part of the last 6 years working
as an architect on Walt Disney World’s
MyMagic+ and other Disney initiatives
Anand Akela
• Director, Product Marketing, AppDynamics

4. Introduction
Why is performance so important?
• Cost to business
• Cost to reputation
• Sleepless nights…
Top 5 Performance Metrics to capture
• There are so many metrics and so many different
strategies to interpret them so how do we get the
biggest bang for our efforts?
• This presentation reviews strategies for identifying
performance issues in your application

5. Top 5 performance metrics to capture

6. #1 Business Transactions
• Business Transactions (BTs) capture real users
interacting with your application
• Capture requests from an entry-point
• Web request, Servlet, Struts Action, Spring MVC
Controller, message on a message queue, etc.
• Follow the request through the container
• Identify exit-points through which the request
goes to another container
• Web service call, RMI, JDBC, JMS, etc.
• Instrument every container and correlate BT
segments from each container into the holistic BT

7. Business Transactions

8. Baselines
• Baselines: measure what “normal” is and
determine whether or not your business
transactions are behaving “normally”
• Baseline Types
• Response times over a period of time
• Response times based on hour of day
• Response times based on hour of day and day of week
• Response times based on hour of day and day of
month

9. Baseline Alerts

10. #2 External Dependencies
• An external dependency is any system with
which your application interacts to accomplish its
business goal
• Web services, Databases (SQL and NoSQL), Legacy
Systems, Caches, Key/Value Stores, etc.
• Differentiate between applications problems and
dependency problems
• If your dependencies are not automatically
identified by your APM solution, configure them!

11. #3 Caching Strategy
• It is always faster to serve an object from
memory than it is to make a network call to
retrieve data from a dependent source
• IMHO, people that do not like caching are not
configuring them properly
• Two types of errors
• Loading too much data into your cache
• Not properly sizing the cache

12. Cache Thrashing

13. #4 Garbage Collection
• Garbage collection has been and continues to be the
biggest component of poor JVM performance
• It removed the notion of manual memory management
and eliminated traditional memory leaks, but at the cost
of sometimes cumbersome garbage collection processes
• Different JVMs have different strategies that each
introduce their own set of benefits and challenges
• Understanding how garbage collection works will help you tune it
• For this discussion we’ll review the Sun JVM

14. Reachability Test

15. Minor and Major GCs
Minor Collection Major Collection

16. #5 Application Topology
• With the advent of the cloud, applications can
now be elastic in nature: your application
environment can grow and shrink to meet your
user demand
• Take inventory of your servers and ensure that
your environment is sized optimally
• Too many servers means a higher cloud cost and
wasted resources
• Too few servers means that servers will be
overburdened and your business transactions will
suffer

17. Performance Monitoring
Tips & Tricks

18. Business Transaction Optimization
• It is important to capture the business
transactions that are important to you
• Properly name BTs to match your business processes
• Filter out the BTs that are not important
• Capture BTs properly
• Default behavior may not match your business needs
• If your URLs are complex then tell AppDynamics how
to interpret them
• If you have a central controller that differentiates
functionality by payload then configure it as such
• Etc.

19. Snapshot Tuning
• Snapshots are invaluable in helping you identify the root
cause of your performance problems; they give you a
trace through your entire business transaction with
associated response times
• Default snapshot configuration samples threads every
10ms
• If you do not need this level of granularity then increasing the
interval will reduce overhead at the cost of granularity
• Slow transactions are configured to capture up to 5
samples per minute for 5 minutes
• If you typically only examine two or three snapshots then turn this
down

20. Threshold Tuning
• Thresholds control when alerts are raised and
when snapshots are triggered
• Three types of thresholds:
• Static SLA
• Standard Deviation
• Percentage
• Choose and configure the strategy that meets
your business needs

21. Tier Management
• AppDynamics measures and evaluates
performance at the business transaction level as
well as at the segment level
• Segments are defined by the tiers that
implement them and are transitioned via exit-
points
• Standard protocols are available out-of-the-box
• If you have non-standard communication
protocols then you need to tell AppDynamics
when your code is leaving a tier

22. Context…
• Many times, when performance issues occur,
contextual information can provide you with
much needed debug content
• AppDynamics allows you to capture
• HTTP Headers
• JMS Properties
• HTTP Query Parameters
• Method Parameter Values

23. Intelligent Container Recycling
• As applications are moving to the cloud, your
infrastructure is changing
• Smart deployment strategies allow you add
servers to and remove servers from your
environment to meet user demand
• Cycle your virtual machines or containers
intelligently
• Shutdown your oldest machines first so that virtual
machines have short lives
• Anecdotal example: eliminating garbage collection
through smart recycling!

24. Summary
• Performance is a measurable concern
• We reviewed 5 metrics to capture to help us identify
performance problems
• We reviewed tips-and-tricks for configuring
AppDynamics for optimal performance troubleshooting
http://blog.appdynamics.com/java/top-5-java-performance-metrics-to-capture-
in-enterprise-applications/

25. Today’s Monitoring: Many Silo-ed Tools
33%
issues are reported by
end users
77%
issues require 5+ people-
hour to resolve
* Survey response from 302 IT
professionals conducted by EMA
65%
enterprises have 10+
monitoring tools.
0%
1%
13%
21%
22%
15%
9%
6%
3%
10%
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%
0
1
2-5
6-10
11-25
26-40
41-50
50-75
76-100
More than 100
Q: how many enterprise monitoring/mgmt products would you estimate your IT org owns?*

26. AppDynamics Unified Monitoring
One Solution : One UI, One Data Platform, One Install
Copyright © 2014 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 26
Industry-first application-centric Unified monitoring platform

27. Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 27
 Business transaction-centric
management
 Role-relevant views for quick
troubleshooting
 One Unified Platform - Easy to
deploy and Use, Flexible
Deployment
 Comprehensive Application
Infrastructure Support
Key Focus Areas of Unified Monitoring

28. AppDynamics Unified Monitoring Pays off for Paychex
Copyright © 2014 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 28
Challenges Benefits
Why AppDynamics?
• Tool consolidation – replaced 5 tools with
AppDynamics
• Improved capacity-planning capabilities
• Increased troubleshooting efficiency and staff
prioritization
• Too many monitoring tools and many of them
didn’t meet expectations
• Lack of deep visibility into the application
infrastructure
• Existing monitoring tools couldn’t support the
continuous delivery model with 3 code releases
per week
• Quickly drill down into performance data to troubleshoot
issues
• Integration with enterprise logging and management tools
• Exceptional training and technical support
“AppDynamics replaced 5 tools we once used to try to troubleshoot application problems.
Today, everyone goes to AppDynamics to quickly determine the root cause of the issue.”
- Jason Briggs, Monitoring Engineering Manager, Paychex
https://www.appdynamics.com/case-study/paychex/

29. Join us in Vegas for our annual user conference,
AppSphere!
- Free training for all attendees
- Exclusive access to AppDynamics executives and engineers
- A sneak peek at our roadmap and announcements about new features
- Keynotes from industry innovators
- Information-packed breakout sessions from users in the trenches
- Peer-to-peer networking
Learn more and register now at Appdynamics.com/AppSphere

30. Q&A

31. Sign-up for your Free Trial today!
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32. Thank You