When the Light’s Red, Whose Throat Do I Choke?

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

Application performance management (APM) solutions get at the system-wide nature of application performance issues. They follow important parts of an application transaction across IT domains, stitch together a cohesive mapping and summation of the application’s journey across IT infrastructure, and generate an alerting drill-down when application performance slows.

Sounds great, but the problem is that often these solutions are really meant for developers who can implement and understand deep app instrumentation. Otherwise they require significant transaction profiling, both upfront and as applications and systems change.  Neither of these approaches is really suitable for dynamic production environments. It goes without saying that production is hardly the place to install developer level debugging tools, and with the size and scope of today’s data centers there are few applications that can justify the cost and effort to continually maintain hardcoded transaction profiles (excepting perhaps trading applications in the exchanges).

BlueStripe’s FactFinder has broken away from those approaches and figured out that their real APM value is to IT operators. IT ops folks just aren’t up for instrumenting apps or modifying operating systems or maintaining transaction profiles. They just want to know whose throat to choke when the light goes red on performance – i.e. which level 2 admin in which domain should they call? FactFinder v6 adds Java app JVMs, Websphere, and Weblogic to its automatic application transaction discovery, mapping, and analysis. With these additions BlueStripe provides a fairly broad coverage of application components inside an enterprise data center, which might obviate the need for the other types of APM tools in production. IT operators should take a good look now that BlueStripe is aiming squarely for their production APM needs.

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