Join us for a webinar exploring the best practices for managing SaaS applications, including:

• Important ways that the management of SaaS and hosted application management differ
• The unique challenges of supporting enterprise SaaS applications
• Case studies demonstrating new techniques and tools for measuring the performance of hosted applications like Salesforce.com.

Register today.

With the continued importance of cloud and mobile technologies, application performance management will play an even bigger role in IT departments than it does now. The overwhelming majority of mobile users expect their applications to have similar performance levels to those in traditional settings. Demonstrating SLA compliance in cloud environments will be crucial to vendors and users alike.

I am excited to see how these trends will continue to develop over time!

• The performance challenges faced by Enterprise IT today
• What is software performance engineering (SPE)?
• Best practices for building scalable software systems
• The approaches to integrating SPE into IT project lifecycles
• Common frameworks for measuring application performance and service levels
• The impact of SPE on software developers, testers, capacity planes,
and other IT professionals
• Case studies from the finance, retail, and insurance industries

Instructor: Walter Kuketz, SVP and CTO, Collaborative Consulting

This training is sponsored by Correlsense, Collaborative Consulting,
and New Horizons.

But it is the trip to the tailor that I want to talk about. I went on a Thursday to have some small alterations made. He looked at me and said my suit would be ready in a week. I was stunned- my flight was in three days and I never expected it would take so long. I tried to bargain with the guy, to get him to push my suit to the front of the line, but I had no luck. The tailor waved his hand around the store and said: “look, I have many more like you and these things take time.”

While he took my measurements, I was really disappointed. I paid and left, wondering how I was going to get another suit in time for my flight. About a minute after I left the store, the tailor called me and said: “it will be ready tomorrow morning.”

It had all been a joke!

That made my day, but it also made me think. This tailor has been in the service business for years. He has had lots of time to develop his approach to service, and leaving his store that day, I felt that I needed to learn something from my experience.

I hate the model of setting low expectations and delivering higher. I prefer to have the expectations and deliverables align so there are no surprises.

And then it occurred to me: Performance.

I tried to remember the last time I was amazed by performance in any way. Have you ever said, “Wow, those IT guys have so many servers to manage, so many troubles, zillions of transactions to run… How do they provide me with a millisecond response time?”

Only once have I had that thought; right after my first ever Google search. I remember being amazed at how fast the results came in, especially since my PC can’t search that fast for a file stored on the hard drive. Since then, I can’t recall any surprises similar to my experience with the tailor.

I think it’s time for us to start surprising our customers again.

• How to more effectively manage your IT costs and SLA agreements
• What you need to know about capacity management when operating in both physical and virtual environments
• How performance monitoring in cloud-based environments relate to your capacity management goals
• What is unique about capacity management and monitoring for virtualized applications
• How to align traditional capacity management techniques with the ITIL methodology

This webinar will also include a demo of the SharePath-Athene solution for meeting the challenges of these upcoming trends. 

• Best Practices in planning, executing, and closing out your holiday performance testing campaign
• How to test and monitor mission critical applications leading into and during the holiday season
• Performance testing and monitoring techniques that will guarantee a satisfying end user experience
• Technologies which will allow you to quickly determine the most important tests to run based on what real users are doing
• Case studies and demonstrations showing how the combination of deep transactional data and cloud-based testing deliver confidence in holiday retail readiness

These meetings involve the usual stuff – syncing about the latest tech issues, planning the next steps, discussing training, challenges, implementation processes, unforeseen needs and service feedback. I try to learn what they are doing with the product, look for test cases and probe into the product as well as the service.

One specific thing I am always trying to find out is how are they running their performance process? Who is responsible for it? How is it implemented, both in test and production?

I know that performance is agile and often changing. There isn’t always a dedicated team to run it. Sometimes, it is the IT ops (mainly for production); sometimes it’s the App owners/developers, sometimes performance engineers. These teams can either operate per unit, or for the company as a whole. Obviously, the root of any degradation needs to be found both in testing and production, and it should be a cross-IT effort.

Since performance involves so many components throughout IT, it’s hard to find the right people that can maximize performance. A performance expert needs to be able to look horizontally over all the components, and have the ability to comment on and investigate them professionally. Each component (OS, DB, network etc.) is a whole, and it can take years to master so many fields.

Generally speaking, performance is simply a non-standard structure.

I remember when I ran an operations team in the past; we had a very long argument over whether the DBA’s should be centralized or per application. Eventually, we decided to have one centralized (system DBA’s) and several application-specific (application DBA’s). This kind of structure, along with Data Warehouse DBA’s, has since become a standard in the IT industry.

It will be interesting to see how that performance works out.

People’s lives are constantly changing, just like IT. There are several situations which occur unexpectedly in one’s life; trouble with the mortgage, kids needing braces, a losing basketball team, or even just a lousy mood can skew a person’s outlook. Even positive things cause changes: a great movie, relaxing vacation, or desire for promotion brings about a new state of mind. No matter what has changed, it leads to an impact on the job. The smallest difference in a worker’s life, for better or worse, can change productivity for an entire day, week, month, or year.

Just like IT, it’s very important to monitor any and all changes, since even the slightest difference could have a “butterfly effect,” i.e., a causal chain that leads to major upsets down the line. End-to-end monitoring of your people is in-depth. You need to listen very carefully and ask them the right questions. By building relationships, and interacting non-stop, over and over again, you can at least understand, respond, and manage the changes that happen outside of your control.

An old professor from my MBA studies left me with some knowledge that I’ll never forget. He said “your employees will always talk, always complain. That’s a fact and you can’t change it. The challenge is to get them to talk to you.”

IT components will always change, that’s the nature of a “good” IT environment. Some of them will cause huge headaches for IT management and that’s a fact we must live with. The challenge is to make those changes visible, from end to end, so that we can effectively monitor and react to them. I wish I had a performance management tool for Human Resources! Now, I’m just doing it manually!

The crucial problem which caused the demise of BSM is the actual products never lived up to the hype. The industry began overusing the term almost immediately after its initial inception. BSM became a fancy marketing term for several, incredibly varied products. Furthermore, if you look at most of the BSM tools available versus the marketing terminologies used to describe them, there is an enormous disconnect. BSM is a catch-all phrase for anything and everything. However, some BSM products are simple remedy tools. None of the BSM offerings could offer you a full view of your IT from a transactional perspective.

Here is an example which helps illustrate these problems. I recently took a look at a BSM company’s website to view their offerings and product descriptions. They had 36 products all grouped under BSM! This three-letter company put more emphasis on utilizing the term than describing what the products actually do.

The industry has been trending away from BSM for a little while now. The launch of APMdigest seems to be the exclamation point. Going forward there are still many interesting points to consider though. What exactly is the right term for our industry? Is it APM? Something else?

Do you think BSM is dead? What do you see as the correct term for our industry?