Topic: apm
An issue of ‘understandability’
This word understandability is starting to be heard, as the next evolutionary step beyond observability. And understandability is key to finding problems more quickly. Mehdi Daoudi, CEO at digital experience monitoring solution provider Catchpoint, recalled an effort when he was running monitoring at DoubleClick years ago. “I sat down with a bunch of engineers and … continue reading
The importance of tracing
Tracing, according to Lightstep CTO and co-founder Daniel ‘Spoons’ Spoonhower, provides context, which serves as the backbone for what’s happening when an application’s performance degrades. “Tracing is really just understanding causal relationships in your software,” he explained. “It sounds obvious in retrospect, but using causal relationships to form the way that data is collected, analyzed … continue reading
The modern world of application monitoring
Application performance monitoring is more important than ever, due to the rising complexity of software applications, architectures and the infrastructure that runs them. When monitoring tools first were developed, the systems they were looking at were fairly simple — it was a monolithic application, running in a corporate-owned data center, on one network. The idea … continue reading
Three pillars of observability
Cindy Sridharan’s popular “Distributed Systems Observability” book published by O’Reilly claims that logs, metrics, and traces are the three pillars of observability. According to Sridharan, an event log is a record of events that contains both a timestamp and payload of content. Event logs come in three forms: Plaintext: A log record stored in plaintext … continue reading
Application performance management vs. application stability management
Traditional application performance management was built from the ground up to be for infrastructure operations and the emergent DevOps teams. They were not designed for product and engineering teams. But if you’re a developer, and you’re writing code to deliver to your customers in the form of an application or a service, you’d likely want … continue reading
Observability: It’s all about the data
Observability is the latest evolution of application performance monitoring, enabling organizations to get a view into CI/CD pipelines, microservices, Kubernetes, edge devices and cloud and network performance, among other systems. While being able to have this view is important, handling all the data these systems throw off can be a huge challenge for organizations. In … continue reading
Monitoring applications in modern software architectures
In today’s modern software world, applications and infrastructure are melding together in different ways. Nowhere is that more apparent than with microservices, delivered in containers that also hold infrastructure configuration code. That, combined with more complex application architectures (APIs, multiple data sources, multicloud distributions and more), and the ephemeral nature of software as temporary and … continue reading
Catchpoint adds ‘user sentiment’ to experience monitoring platform
Catchpoint today announced it is adding the ability to capture user sentiment to its digital experience monitoring platform. According to Catchpoint’s announcement, the new capability will offer enterprises “broader insights into the overall health and performance” of their applications and services. The offering rounds out the platform, which already performs synthetic, network, endpoint and real … continue reading
Monitoring tools need to evolve
People have come to expect a certain level of performance from their applications, whether using a consumer application, such as a retail website, or using a business application to get their jobs done. But most monitoring solutions have not adapted to this collapsing of the consumer and business worlds into one, making it difficult for … continue reading
Digital experience monitoring: An outside-in view
Gartner research describes three things that are required for a solution to be categorized as application performance monitoring: application discovery, diagnostics and tracing; data analysis; and digital experience monitoring. Digital experience monitoring, or DEM as it is sometimes called, is different from the other types of monitoring because it takes an outside-in view of the … continue reading
APM, AIOps and Observability
Monitoring your applications comes in many forms. There’s traditional application performance management, which begat AIOps, which begat observability. But are there really any differences? If so, where are they? Some believe these are marketing terms used to differentiate tools. Others point to it as more of an evolution of monitoring. All that said, the performance … continue reading
Leveraging automated APM to accelerate CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery together (CI/CD) have become the goal for a majority of organizations. Meanwhile, modern technologies like Docker and Kubernetes have become widespread in production application environments. The result of these trends is that applications and their infrastructure are becoming increasingly dynamic: constantly changing to meet higher scalability requirements and fast-changing application … continue reading
