CA expert authors a vendor-neutral best practices guide to application performance management
Over the years, application performance management (APM) has turned into one of the must-have but often ill-used technologies that fill an IT professional’s (or business user’s, as the case may be) toolbox.
“For a wide variety of reasons, folks have difficulty getting the full measure of usefulness from their investments in APM. There is often a disconnect between the APM technology capabilities and the organizational capabilities in actually understanding and employing the technology,” says Michael Sydor, an engineering services architect for CA Technologies, in his recently published book, APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management.
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The technology’s challenge starts with its very purchase, Sydor says.
“Most of these investments are done tactically, meaning a business unit or application team will make a decision to go ahead and focus on APM as a technique to help them either better meet deployment schedules or better manage the applications that they have in operation. Those decisions are really made at anywhere from the $100,000 to $500,000 approval level, which means they can pop up all over the place. In some large organizations, you might see dozens of separate APM initiatives,” Sydor explains.
Sydor speaks from years of experience helping customers get the most from their APM deployments. He began developing best practices working at APM vendor Wily Technology, which CA acquired in 2006. But rest assured, he said in an interview, the book is not about how to use CA’s APM offering.
“It’s about how to plan, manage and do some very interesting things with any APM technology,” Sydor says.
While the book is chock-full of best practices for planning, implementation and use, in general it helps organizations:
• Assess where they are in their APM maturity life cycle and learn how to move forward.
• Master basic and advanced techniques for using APM technology to address application performance and overall software quality.
• Justify an APM investment based on their corporate culture.
• Evaluate and select an APM tool.
• Develop techniques to schedule and supervise APM deployments with consistent, predictable and reliable practices.
• Create an APM services catalog for use as investment or critical incidents present themselves.
“For the client, the bottom line is that they’ve already invested in at least one if not two or three APM solution vendors,” Sydor says. “So APM Best Practices, independent of technology, helps companies reuse those investments and get better value out of each of them.
APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management is available for purchase online. Get your copy here.
