The Practical Performance Analyst

You might be asking yourself the question, why would anyone on earth want to validate the Performance of their collaboration suite. Yes, you are right…I had the same question going through my mind when I initially kicked this one off. I couldn’t reconcile with myself that someone actually wanted to invest in validating the performance of their collaboration suite. It’ took me sometime to understand the background and realize the importance of what was being done before the need for a performance baseline actually made sense. Eventually, in addition to establishing a Performance Baseline, the recommendations I made to the program included the need to invest in building capability to address Performance & Capacity management for the entire platform.

Every organization requires a Marketing and a Sales function in some form. The Marketing function within a business is generally tasked with the challenge of building brand and product awareness. The Marketing function focuses on reaching out to potential customers directly or indirectly with the objective of increasing awareness on specific topics, ideas or concepts that are generally very closely related to the brand or a specific product under the brand. Over the last decade marketing strategies have evolved a great deal  so as to make use of all the traditional and “Next Generation” media forms i.e. Social Media, Youtube, etc. to reach out to their customers and create the relevant mindshare on their range of products and solutions.

The new generation of Application Performance Management tools i.e. App Dynamics, New Relic, TraceView are designed to provide the Performance Engineer with a lot of relevant information required to identify potential performance issues. These tools are known to impose some of the lowest management overhead we’ve ever seen at costs that would be the envy of existing APM vendors. The new breed of SaaS based APM tools are revolutionising the way we collect and analyse Performance data for our applications and as these solutions mature we’ll see a whole lot of interesting capability being delivered at an affordable cost.

As part of the research we've been doing here at Practical Performance Analyst to identify and review tools for the Diagnostics Shootout 2013 we've been sifting through large amounts of vendor data sheets, geek speak and analyst predictions. What we find captivates us and we can say with some confidence that we live in interesting and challenging times.

Great metering tools and deep technical understanding are important, but you’ll also need the help of others to do your job.  It will always be true that humans can offer more help than they are required to. They will always want to avoid risk, office politics will always matter, and there will be many ways that you can be right, but still fail because you did not pay attention to the people involved. This article is a summary of key practices that have served me well when working with, and asking for help from, my fellow carbon-based life forms.

In this episode we’ll take a look at New Relic and what it has to offer to the Practical Performance Analyst. New Relic unlike most other Application Diagnostics tools is in class of its own and I say this with an intentional positive spin. New Relic has adopted the SaaS only route and offers all its monitoring and diagnostics capability via the SaaS model over the web. It’s a trend setter and a trail blazer and whichever way the company goes we’ll all will learn a lot along the way.

We've opened up access to iPEN (Institute of Performance Engineering). Everyone can now access the content at absolutely no cost, however we would encourage you to support us by making a small contribution.iPEN is our repository at Practical Performance Analyst for training modules on different aspects of Performance Engineering across the Software Development Life Cycle. You can access iPEN and our other initiatives at Practical Performance Analyst at the following link:

Welcome to the Diagnostics Shootout 2013 at Practical Performance Analyst.

Application Diagnostics is an activity aimed at gaining insight into the behaviour of the application or application container (J2EE or .Net) with the objective of identifying any potential hotspots. One generally uses Application Diagnostics tools to identify application code, application configuration, or infrastructure bottlenecks with the objective of tuning them so as to ensure that Application Business Transaction Response times are within acceptable bounds.

If the decision makers don’t act on your recommendations all your performance work can be wasted. Here are three simple tips that bake a big difference and have saved my bacon more than once.

This is an excerpt (with modifications) from: The Every Computer Performance Book a short, practical, and occasionally funny book written by Bob Wescott (LinkedIn) on doing computer performance work.
 

Queuing theory provides a way to predict the average delay at a service center when the arrival rate of work is greater than the throughput of completed work. The calculations are complex, but luckily we can ignore the math and focus on the seven insights this branch of mathematics can bring to performance work.

As Performance Engineers we are always curious about what goes in within applications, what makes them tick, what makes them perform the way they do and what are the reasons why they perform the way they do. Application Diagnostics is an activity aimed at gaining additional insight into the behavior of the application or application container with the objective of identifying any potential hotspots that might exist.

As part of this series we will look at some of the most commonly used Application Diagnostics solutions on the market, their ease of installation, ease of use including the ability of each of these tools to provide relevant data for purposes of tuning and optimization.

If you are keen observer you would have noticed that over the last few months we've been adding a lot of new functionality at Practical Performance Analyst.

With a bit of simple math you can figure out how much work a lightly loaded resource can theoretically handle, how many jobs are in the system, and how much time those jobs are waiting for their turn to run. These numbers are very useful in capacity planning work and when double-checking numbers that don’t seem quite right. To do this magic trick, I will first define a few technical terms and then we’ll do a bit of simple math.

The last 12 months have been a great journey for all of us here at Practical Performance Analyst. We launched Practical Performance Analyst without much fanfare early last year. From the start we were determined to make Practical Performance Analyst a platform where the larger Performance Engineering community could come together and collaborate on various community building initiatives. The community of authors and contributors at Practical Performance Analyst has been growing over the last year and we truly appreciate all the effort each of the individuals have put in. However, we've got a long way to go and our work has been cut out for us.