APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

585 Pages·2010·10.92 MB·English

by  Michael J. Sydor

APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Managment
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Contents
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Getting Started with APM
PART I: Planning
Chapter 2: Business Justification
Chapter 3: Assessments
Chapter 4: Staffing and Responsibilities
Chapter 5: APM Patterns
Chapter 6: The Pilot Evaluation
PART II: Implementation
Chapter 7: Deployment Strategies
Chapter 8: Essential Processes
Chapter 9: Essential Service Capabilities
PART III: Practitioners
Chapter 10: Solution Sizing
Chapter 11: Load Generation
Chapter 12: Baselines
Chapter 13: The Application Audit
Chapter 14: Triage with Single Metrics
Chapter 15: Triage with Baselines
Chapter 16: Triage with Trends
Chapter 17: Firefighting and Critical Situations
Index
About the Author
Michael J. Sydor is a software solution architect
who has invested 20 years in the mastery of high
performance computing technology. He has
significant experience identifying and
documenting technology best practices and has
designed programs to mentor and realize client
performance management teams. With a broad
combination of software and systems architecture
experience, as well as critical situation and
traditional performance analysis, Michael is well
positioned to influence and guide major
initiatives within client IT organizations, for both
distributed and mainframe architectures, and
across Telco, Cable, Financial Trading, Media,
Banking, Insurance, and Utilities industries.
Acknowledgments
This book is possible only through the efforts and interests of a large number of
people who have supported the project, contributed to this body of experience, or
helped in the refinement of the message. There are three teams:
Team A—My wife Jill and daughter Natasha, who had to endure my constant
distraction and long hours devoted to this project over a very difficult year. Their
support and patience helped keep it going.
Team B—The collaborators: Karen Sleeth (CA Press) and Jeff Cobb at CA.
Jeffrey Pepper (editor) and Lauren Becker at Apress, along with the Apress
production team. This is my first book. I needed a lot of help. These folks helped
get it done right.
Team C—The extended team who bring APM to the marketplace: sales,
technical and management.
A number of sales people directly contributed to this project by getting me in
front of the real problems in the industry, primarily Ron Berkovits, who had (and
maintains) a great enthusiasm for the best practices approach. Kristine
Chamberline commissioned the first discussion paper introducing the best
practice value proposition which lead to the vendor-neutral, Center of Excellence
program. Kristine also committed Ron, Sam Terrell and Fran Rempusheski to the
initial rollout of the sales-facing side of this story to further refine business
propositions.
I am of course indebted to my direct and executive management who have kept
me entertained, challenged and employed. This includes Mike Measel, Tom
Bertrand, Kenton Siekman and Chris Cook. Chris has been guiding the APM
business for many years, effectively commissioned this book, and made sure it
survived the nuances of the business. It is exceptionally rare to be able to talk
about what really leads to customer success and see it through.
In order to reach this current level of technical maturity I needed to draw from
many other practitioners including Dave Martin, Ki Allam, Jason Collins, Mark
Addleman, Mike Measel, Carl Seglum, Don Darwin, Haroon Ahmed, Andreas
Reiss, Gil Rice, Paul Jasek, Sylvain Gilbassier, David Barnes, Omar Ocampo,
Mike Risser, Ben Tan, Tom Krupta, Shubra Kar, Matt LeRay, Prabhjot Singh,