Design For Success – Design, Implement, Refine, Succeed

May 01 2014
 


When an organization gets to the point where they realize they need an Application Performance Management (APM) solution, things are usually on fire and getting more unmanageable by the day. For any organization, the purchase of an APM toolset is a large budget item and the pressure is getting these new tools into production and delivering value today, not tomorrow. In these circumstances, it is often difficult to make the time to really think through the process and do the implementation correctly. I know all too well how this feels, because I have been in this position with APM solutions on several occasions. I have deployed almost every major APM solution in this exact situation – executives breathing down my neck to both fix problems and make sure that the money spent delivers value quickly. An alternate title for this post may be “Don’t Make the Same Mistakes I Did” or even “My Pain, Your Gain”.

Tactical Deployment vs. Strategic Enablement

When it comes to enabling agent-based APM solutions in your environment, it’s typically a relatively easy task. Put agent binaries on the machines you want to monitor, modify your application startup parameters to use the agent binaries, restart the application, and presto, you have an application monitored by APM – or so you can tell your bosses. However, the reality is, if you don’t think through how the agents are organized within the solution, and you don’t plan for how you will automate the deployment and enablement of those agents, you will get nowhere near the value you could get from the money spent on your solution. It is very hard to put the brakes on and wait to do things right, but even with the smallest level of effort ahead of time, you can reap 10 times that effort in lost productivity and greater visibility down the line. This small amount of effort is what enables your APM solution rather than merely deploying a product.

A Tale of Two Deployments

I currently spend my time in the field helping AppDynamics enterprise customers get the most value from their APM investment. However, these stories come from my past experience deploying APM solutions at large Fortune 500 companies, pre-AppDynamics.

At one of these companies, we had just made a significant investment in an APM solution, and the pressure was on to deploy the solution overnight. I thought it was really as simple as I described earlier, so I went about making plans to get this deployment done. The mindset was purely tactical (get agents out, turn agents on, PROFIT). When it came to questions like how the application should organized within the solution (what is a tier, what is a node, how should tiers be grouped together) it seemed as simple as just grouping tiers owned by one group together into a single bucket, one “Application” in AppDynamics terms. So this is what I did. In a matter of a few days, after some herculean efforts to get change requests in, planning for application restarts, getting change management exceptions, etc, all of the agents were up and reporting in to the APM solution. However, when I started looking at the visibility I gained from this solution I was perplexed because calls that should be flowing from one tier to another tier simply weren’t showing up as I expected. As it turns out, data that flows from one tier to another tier that was part of another “Application” were showing as a call to an external system rather than a call flowing through the other tier as I expected. Consequently, a significant reconfiguration effort had to made in order to get this data flow corrected. Even a little time spent initially understanding how to design the hierarchy in the APM tool would have avoided this significant headache, nevermind the credibility lost by deploying something that didn’t deliver the value promised.

At another company, I took the time to make a bit of a sketch of how I thought the data should flow from tier to tier. One meeting with the application team who owned the monitored application was sufficient to whiteboard this high level picture, and from here determine what the proper agent configuration should be. With this knowledge, I then developed scripts that did the work of pushing the agent binaries out to the servers and configuring the relevant properties to enable them. In a few days longer than was required to simply push the agents manually and ask questions later, I had the agents deployed, and a fully enabled APM solution.

Lessons Learned and Applying Lessons to AppDynamics Deployments

The most important thing to consider when deploying any APM solution is how the tool enables you to understand true application performance. One key element of this is the application hierarchy inside of your APM tool. A good way to think of this in AppDynamics terms is as follows:

  1. Application – This is the top level of the hierarchical configuration. All services that talk to each other should be in the same AppDynamics Application. For most customers, from very small to the biggest customers using AppDynamics, the starting point should be a single Application. Only when it is absolutely known that a monitored process communicates with no other monitored processes should they be broken out into a separate application.
  2. Tier – A tier should combine all runtime elements that implement similar services. If there are several runtimes that are load balanced, this is a good indication that they belong in the same tier. If two runtimes implement the same services, they should be grouped together.
  3. Node – This is the lowest level element in the AppDynamics monitoring hierarchy and the easiest to understand. This is a single monitored run time, whether it be a JVM, a .NET CLR, or a PHP server.

Take the time to briefly sketch out a high-level flow map, and this will get you thinking in the right way about how to lay these things out. If you need assistance, reach out to AppDynamics field enablement teams to help you understand how this should be laid out. Additional information can be found in the AppDynamics Center of Excellence Best Practices Guides.

Lastly, take the time to automate your agent rollout and enablement. Building an APM solution should be an iterative process, where you can easily deploy and remove agents, and reconfigure them as needed. Doing this small amount of pre work will save you much of the pain I experienced in my earliest APM deployments.

Take five minutes to get complete visibility into the performance of your production applications with AppDynamics Pro today.

Christopher St. Pierre
Chris has been working in software performance engineering and APM since his early days at Sun Microsystems in 1995. Chris has worked with Java technology from its infancy at Sun Microsystems through to today. He has worked as an Architect across many industries for the last 14 years, but for the last 6 years, Chris has been focused strictly on APM and has worked to build APM centers of excellence at Fortune 500 institutions. His primary focus is on Solutions Architecture and insuring that APM solutions are deployed to meet strategic business needs, not just technological needs. Chris joined AppDynamics in 2013.

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