Application of performance management Maturity Model

Prove APM in the enterprise

Anyone who has worked in an enterprise IT organization will find that some good tools are frequently discarded. Sometimes it is because the tools themselves do not meet their original expectations or needs, sometimes because the tool's advocates leave the agency, or simply because the technology becomes obsolete after the vendor has been acquired or the product has been discarded. This is also true for tools for applied-ability Management (APM). There is no final solution to the problem. However, if your job is to purchase tools such as APM, here are some steps you can follow to avoid the embarrassment of the software you are purchasing to end up being shelved. Here are some of the lessons I've learned in my career as a monitoring architect and APM buyer.

1. Write down the things that make you miserable

No one will agree to pay for the end of a tool unless there are real problems that hurt your business (e.g. income reduction, productivity impact, customer satisfaction, etc.). If you want to prove the rationality of a purchase, you have to find out the real problem and write it down. It is best to relate to business or mission critical applications such as your E-commerce platform, online transaction applications, payment gateways, risk computing, billing systems, and so on.

Identify applications or services that have a severe impact on your business due to poor performance and/or downtime, and record the following:

Number of issues and severity levels

Average repair time (mttr--is usually the average time from the problem to the resolved)

Quantify business impact (for example: Dollar lost per minute, lost potential, per minute transactions)

Average number of employees involved in troubleshooting each problem

The root cause of each accident

You will use these data in subsequent assessment documents and business certifications.

2. Inventory the tools you have

Many IT organizations have dozens of of tools that are rarely used, or have just been used. If you haven't finished working on the statistics, you need to take inventory of the software you already have and record it. As long as you continue to update this list, you will be using this information for many years to come:

What are the tools and how are these tools categorized? (For example: database monitoring, network monitoring, operating system monitoring, desktop monitoring)

What software licenses do we have and what licenses are still in validity?

What are the areas that these tools are good at?

What are the areas that these tools are not good at?

What can be categorized as APM tools?

If I already have the APM tool, why is it not being used properly?

Label the tools you have to make it easier to understand their functionality. Doing so will help you identify where your weak links are, and you can find tools that you have that you have yet to make full use of.

3. Find your blind spot

Now that you have a panoramic view of the entire monitoring system system, you need to see if there are any vulnerabilities. One way to check is to compare your existing toolset with the Toolset model that an application management solution should contain, for example, the 5 dimensions of APM defined by Gartner. For a "complete" APM solution, the Gartner model includes the following 5 standards:

End-User experience Monitoring: measure the response time for all interactions between your application and the end user. It is not enough to understand just how fast an application can run within the data center.

Applying topology mapping: Automatically detects and displays the components involved in all application delivery. You need to know which application components are used at any given time, especially if a problem affects your users.

Business Transaction Analysis (Business Transaction Profiling): Detects and measures response time in all application component activities involved in a request initiated by a single user. This is different from measuring the response time for a single Web page.

Depth Application Diagnostics: Detects and measures the elapsed time that code executes in your application container. If your current or future solution does not need to be loaded into the application container, you will not be needing this important feature.

Analysis: Intelligent application of data will provide you with information to perform. Analysis and reporting are different, and analysis can (should) be the key authentication method between multiple competing schemes.

The Gartner model should give you some idea of what you can look for in an APM solution. But most of the software itself does not contain the five aspects of APM described above, so many organizations use a combination of different tools to meet their visibility needs. Review the list of tools in your Inventory software list to find vulnerabilities in your existing APM strategy.

Once you have proven and established the APM process in your organization and even acquired an APM tool, the focus will be on starting to measure the effectiveness of APM programs and identifying areas for improvement. This is where the APM Maturity Model can help you assess and analyze.

A new APM Maturity Model

Maturity models are often difficult to succeed because they are too biased. Vendors force maturity models to sell to their customers and do their best to improve adoption and retention of the model, while customers are too busy solving problems to be very it. That's why I'm proposing my own APM maturity Model, which will be based on real-world experience to help us solve looming problems and use the APM tools, not just the theory of how APM should be used. In this section, I will present my new maturity model and provide some typical problems that APM buyers or users may raise at each stage.

What kind of questions would you ask?

The best indicator of where you are in the maturity model depends on your organization's problems and the type of presentation. For example, when my child asks where the baby is coming from, I immediately know where he is in the life Maturity model-and when any other child asks the same question, it is likely to be at the same stage regardless of age. To make it easier to identify the phases you and your organization are currently in, I've sorted out the different types of questions you might ask at each stage of the process, and organized my maturity model.