APM Predictions

In a recent APMdigest article, eG Innovations Senior Product Marketing Manager Vinod Mohan offered a series of predictions for application performance monitoring this year. Here’s an excerpt:

Application and Infrastructure Monitoring Will Need to Converge

Today, application performance monitoring tools focus mainly on code-level performance. These tools are effective when performance bottlenecks are in the application code (e.g., inefficient method call, poorly designed database queries, external web service causing a slowdown, etc.). At the same time, the performance of applications also depends on the IT infrastructure they operate on. Performance bottlenecks in any of the infrastructure tiers, such as database servers, the virtualization platform supporting the application, the storage tier, or infrastructure services – such as Active Directory, file access etc. – result in application slowdowns. One example of this would be how a storage bottleneck can cause database queries to be slow, which in turn affects the user experience.

Until now, IT organizations have been using different tools for application and infrastructure monitoring. This forces performance diagnosis across application and infrastructure tiers to be performed manually. Not only is this process slow and time consuming, but it also requires domain experts to be involved for troubleshooting.

Prediction: Application managers and IT teams will realize that they need contextual visibility into how an infrastructure problem affects application performance. This year will see an increasing demand for converged monitoring tools that include both application and infrastructure monitoring capabilities. These tools will be expected to cross-correlate across application and infrastructure tiers automatically to pinpoint the cause of application slowness: is it in the application code, or is it due to one of the infrastructure tiers, and why?