Product Support
Support for your product in a single location.
Downloads
New releases, updates and patches.
Professional Services
Maximize your investmentFind out how we can help
Executive Blog
Our leaders' commentary on news inthe software industry. Read now
Careers
Where do you want to be?Search jobs
Businesses are driving their IT operations managers to improve performance and boost productivity by becoming increasingly application-centric, a radical change of the infrastructure-centric approach that IT has had for years. At the same time, however, applications themselves are becoming increasingly difficult to manage as they move toward highly-distributed, multi-tier, multi-element constructs that in many cases rely on application development frameworks such as Microsoft .NET or Java.In The Five Essential Elements of Application Performance Monitoring, author and renowned business technology expert Don Jones discusses an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) approach that helps businesses achieve this new application-centric focus. You will learn how to improve application performance from the perspective of the business and the end user. Jones offers an informative discussion of new tools and techniques that are enabling new, more effective forms of APM, and closes the book with a set of evaluation criteria for APM tools, based on this approach.
We're moving on to the third dimension of application performance monitoring (APM). At this point, we've learned to monitor the end‐user experience (EUE) as our primary, top-level performance metric. That will let us know whether our application is performing to our business needs, and comprises the first dimension of APM. The second dimension, discussed in the previous chapter, involves tracking individual user transactions through our application, which provides us with high‐level insight into how individual elements of the application are performing. At that level, we should be able to tell which major component of our application is contributing to poor EUE metrics. For example, we might be able to narrow the problem to a Web server, database server, or some other high‐level component. Once we've done so, we need to dive deeper into those components to find the root cause of the performance problem.Before we can do that, we need to help our monitoring tools understand how our application is built-and we need to do so at a fairly granular level. So before we can begin the component‐level deep‐dive, and indeed before we can even start seriously evaluating the user transaction tracking, we have to create a model of our application, which is the third dimension of APM's five‐dimensional, or 5D, model.Gartner defines this dimension as the "…technologies [that] discover what software and hardware components are exercised as user‐defined transactions are executed, and how those components are related to one another, [insofar] as they support user‐defined transaction execution paths." Gartner also notes that this is the one dimension in the model that is still maturing; in today's solutions, you can expect a combination of three techniques:
