Larry Dragich

The "Butterfly Effect" theoretically describes a hurricane's formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings weeks before. This highlights a sensitive dependence on environmental conditions where a small change at one place (Dev Env) can result in large differences to a later state (Production). Consider the possibility that a small innocuous code change could go undetected, promoted through Development & QA, and then have catastrophic effects on performance once it reaches production. The environmental variants need to be minimized and closely monitored to prevent the anomalous behavior. Depending on transaction volume and performance characteristics there will be a certain level of noise that will need to be squelched to a volume level that can be analyzed. This is the precipice where APM intersects Capacity Management and a... (more)

The Anatomy of APM

By embracing End-User-Experience (EUE) measurements as a key vehicle for demonstrating productivity, you build trust with your constituents in a very tangible way.  The translation of IT metrics into business meaning (value) is what APM is all about. The goal here is to simplify a complicated technology space by walking through a high-level view within each core element.  I'm suggesting that the success factors in APM adoption center around the EUE and the integration touch points with the ITIL / ITSM processes. When looking at APM at 20,000 feet, four foundational elements come ... (more)

Event Management: Reactive, Proactive or Predictive?

Can event management help foster a curiosity for innovative possibilities to make application performance better? Blue-sky thinkers may not want to deal with the myriad of details on how to manage the events being generated operationally, but could learn something from this exercise. Consider the major system failures in your organization over the last 12 to 18 months. What if you had a system or process in place to capture those failures and mitigate them from a proactive standpoint preventing them from reoccurring? How much better off would you be if you could avoid the prover... (more)

The DNA of APM: Event to Incident Flow

This article is the corollary to “The Anatomy of APM” which outlines four foundational elements of a successful APM strategy:  Top Down Monitoring, Bottom Up Monitoring, Reporting & Analytics, and ITIL / ITSM Processes.  Here I provide a deeper context on how the event-to-incident flow is structured. It is the correlation of events and the amalgamation of metrics that bring value to the business by way of dashboards and trending reports, and it’s in the way the business interprets the accuracy of those metrics that determines the success of the implementation.  If an event occur... (more)

APM Convergence: Monitoring vs. Management

APM is entering into a period of intense competition of technology and strategy with a multiplicity of vendors and viewpoints. While the nomenclature used within its space has five distinct dimensions that elucidate its meaning, the very acronym of APM is in question: Application Performance ... Monitoring vs. Management. It's strange to think that we would not normally use monitoring and management synonymously, but when used in the APM vernacular they seem to be interchangeable. This may be a visceral response, but I see the APM idiom converging on itself and becoming a matter... (more)