Accelerating Your Mastery of APM Through Skills Self-Analysis - AppSphere16

Accelerating your mastery of APM
through skills self-analysis
Srikar Achanta
Senior Consultant | AppDynamics

APPDYNAMICS CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY 2
Notice
The information and materials included in this presentation (collectively, the
“Materials”) are the proprietary information of AppDynamics, Inc. (“AppDynamics” or
the “Company”). No part of the Materials may be reproduced, distributed,
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The Materials may contain product roadmap information of AppDynamics.
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AppDynamics' general product direction, it is not a guarantee of future product
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AppDynamics' products remains at AppDynamics' sole discretion. AppDynamics
reserves the right to change any planned features at any time before making them
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All third-party trademarks, including names, logos and brands, referenced by
AppDynamics in this presentation are property of their respective owners. All
references to third-party trademarks are for identification purposes only and shall be
considered nominative fair use under trademark law. © 2016 AppDynamics, Inc. All
rights reserved.

APM Maturity Lifecycle
• Identify gaps
• Establish (or increase) triage
• Leverage (or establish) QA activities
• Enhance the deployment mechanism
• Enhance (or establish) collaboration
Copyright © 2016 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 3

Core APM Competencies
Rapid deployments
Solution sizing
Application audit
Triage
Assessments

APM Architectures

APM Maturity Model
Unaware
Overwhelmed
Effective
Optimized
Capabilities
BusinessValue
ValueGap

Capability Skills Assessment
Level 0 - Unaware
Level 1 - Overwhelmed
Level 2 - Effective
Level 3 - Opimized APMDeploymentPatterns
Collaboration
ValueDelivery
Infrstructure
Operations
Developer
Quality Assurance
Business Owner

Foundation
Assess APM Practice
Copyright © 2016 AppDynamics. All rights reserved.8

Four dimensions of Assessments
Application assessment
Skills assessment
Visibility assessment
Performance assessment

Copyright © 2016 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 10Copyright © 2016 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 10
Assessments
Application Skills
PerformanceVisibility
Solution Architecture
&
Application Priority
End-to-End visibility
&
Log assessments/Interviews
Roles/Responsibilities
&
Who owns monitoring?
Baselines and Stability
&
Potential Scalability

Skill #1
Appropriate APM Deployment
Patterns

APM anti-patterns
• Monitoring tunnel vision: APM enabled everywhere, but only
used for basic availability monitoring or hardly used
• Fire alarm: Use APM when absolutely needed
• Highlander: Single user managing hundreds of apps
• Geek pack: Single vertical employs monitoring, usually
Operations
• Street light: Triaging issues with existing tools and not doing
visibility audit

APM patterns
• Best practices: A collection of the activities that a successful
APM discipline will use
• Service catalog: Activities performed by a specific
implementation of APM
• Examples of APM activities: APM deployment, on-boarding,
triaging, performance tuning, assessments, SLA management,
dashboards, capacity planning

Organizational strategies for APM roll-out
• Ad hoc
1. Initial
2. Growing
3. Mature
• Service bureau
1. Take charge of on-boarding process
2. Roll-out of SLA management
• Center of Excellence (CoE)
1. Education & self-service
2. Establish and share triage specialists

Assess Skill APM Deployment Patterns
Level Required Elements
Level 0 - Unaware No APM or Tools Only Deployed During
Trouble
Level 1 - Overwhelmed APM Deployed but noisy and not refined
Centralized Control and Distribution (by
Vertical / Person)
Level 2 - Effective Service Catalog Available
Some Documentation of Best Practices
Level 3 – Optimized Full Playbooks Deployed
Established Knowledge Base
Center or Excellence Established

Building skill #1 with AppDynamics
Education and collateral development during deployment
AppDynamics Training and Education Plan
New
Users
Intermediate
Knowledge
Advanced
Skill
Brown Bag
Rapid Starts
Instructor Led
Training
Self Paced
Specialized Topics
DeploymentPhaseBegin
DeploymentPhaseEnd
Deploy AppDynamics to Test Environment Deploy AppDynamics to Production Environment

Skill #2
Foster collaboration
among Dev-QA-OPS

Quality Assurance (QA) & APM
• QA should ideally test APM processes/best practices, along with
testing the application
• Validating thresholds and baselines
• Practice (or establish) finding root-cause to complex issues by
collaborating with developers and infrastructure engineers
• Pass on these triaging/root-cause skills to DevOps and SiteOps

Developers & APM
• Involve developers to define deep code-level metrics
• Developers need to be part of triaging complex issues, as they
have special know-how
• Its better to resolve issues in pre-prod, as it is exponentially
costlier to fix the same issue in production

Use Cases
Why does the diagnostics solution exist and how does it
provide a reduction to “Mean Time to Resolution” MTTR?
Problem isolation:
• Isolate a performance, memory and stability issues
in a heterogeneous environment.
Actionable information
 Focused and pertinent information to the correct
subject matter expert (J2EE portal admin,
mainframe administrator, DBA, etc.)
Business transaction visibility
 Identify complex performance bottlenecks by
application, business
 Shared context and shared resources
Problem
isolation
Actionable
information
Business transaction
& resource based
visualization

Assess Collaboration
Level 0 - Unaware Fully Silo’ed / Little Communication
Between Dev / QA / Operations
Level 1 - Overwhelmed Operations using APM
QA and Development using APM
sporadically
Level 2 - Effective Performance Assessed early in SDLC
Operations team shares performance data
to development and QA
Level 3 – Optimized Bi directional data sharing and testing
Close team collaboration on finding issues
and production and replicating in
development

Build Collaboration muscles with AppDynamics
• Production ready deep-diagnostics agents
• ‘Compare release’ feature and comprehensive support to CI
• ‘Transaction snapshots’, data collectors, and ‘information points’
for developers to dig deep and resolve complex issues.
• ‘War room’, dashboards and alerts to uncover and resolve issues
quicker by effective collaboration

Build Collaboration muscles with AppDynamics

Skill #3
Value Delivery

Key Values
25
• Reduce Mean Time To Recovery
(MTTR)
• Improve Root Cause Analysis
• Reduce Developer Labor - Code
Defect Troubleshooting
• Pro-Actively Identify Issues
• Improve Service Level Availability
• Improve Revenue Protection
• Reduce Monitoring Administration
Labor
• Enhanced Adoption
• Tools Consolidation
• Code Tuning / Server
Optimization
• Pre-prod testing efficiency

Essential Processes
Performance Mgmt. Runbooks Pre-production
DevelopmentOperations
and
Onboard and Audit
Application
Improve Software Quality
War-rooms & On-call Process

Essential Services
Triaging & Root-cause Application Audit
Metrics Capacity Management
Pre-production Review
• Application use cases
• Performance baselines
• Alerting Strategies
• Dashboards
Perf. Tuning
&
Proactive monitoring

Assess Value Delivery
Level 0 - Unaware APM deployments focused on fire fighting
and triage
Level 1 - Overwhelmed APM data domains in support of specific
values identified
Level 2 - Effective Data gathered and analyzed
Capacity management and MTTR
measurement process identified
Level 3 – Optimized APM effectively used to reduce operational
costs (capacity, MTTR, RCA, etc.)

Building Value Delivery Skills with AppDynamics
• Domains of work
– Product
• Core monitoring
configuration
• Advanced monitoring
configuration
• Proactive monitoring
– People
– Process

Value Delivery: Implementation

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Credits
• “APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance
Management”, Michael J. Sydor, 2010 CA Press
• “Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization”,
Steven Haines, 2006 Apress
• “Systems Performance : Enterprise and the cloud”, Brendan Gregg,
2014 Pearson Education, Inc

Accelerating Your Mastery of APM Through Skills Self-Analysis - AppSphere16

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