Google today announced that it is making available application performance management (APM) tools based on the same technology it employs to manage its internal IT environment.

Morgan McLean, a product manager at Google, said Stackdriver APM is based the open source StackDriver Trace and Debugger tools Google originally developed for its DevOps teams.

The APM offering, available in beta, also includes Stackdriver Profiler, a tool Google developed to enable DevOps teams to explore how their code is running in a production environment.

Google also said it has integrated Stackdriver Debugger with GitHub Enterprise and GitLab to extend the number of repositories developers can use to create mirrors of their code.

DevOps teams will have the option of deploying Google APM tools either on-premises or on a public cloud.

McLean noted that rather than throwing additional compute resources at a performance issue, Stackdriver Profile enables DevOps teams to discover and remediate issues and ultimately reduce costs. To minimize the impact of Stackdriver Profile on the performance of a production application, Google opted to employ statistical methods to create a profile of a piece of code. Specifically, Stackdriver Profiler collects data via lightweight sampling-based instrumentation that runs across every instance an application. Data showing CPU time, wall time, RAM used and contention, for example, is then displayed on a flame chart.

At the core of the Google APM toolkit is a the Stackdriver Trace software the company developed to collect latency data about applications deployed in a distributed computing environment. McLean said that in the age of microservices it’s not feasible to managed modern distributed applications without any ability to instrument them. For many IT organizations, however, the cost of acquiring APM software or employing a cloud service has forced them to limit their use of APM technologies to only their most critical applications.

Google is trying to remove cost as significant APM factor, which ultimately will result in the applications deployed on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) becoming more robust and reliable. The Google APM tools can be applied to applications running on virtual machines and containers, as well as the Google AppEngine, a framework Google exposes on its cloud service to enable the development and hosting of applications. In effect, Google is making it easier for organizations to consume open source tools that IT operations previously would have had to stitch together on their own.

Reliance on APM tools is at the heart of any DevOps process. But DevOps processes are not universally employed, largely because in addition to acquiring new tools, organizations must evolve their processes and culture. The debate many of them have comes down to an argument over whether they need to buy tools before they change those processes or change their processes to justify buying the tools. Most often, it’s the initiative of handful of developers that force the issue. It’s only once that team is successful that senior managers start to think about replicating the DevOps process employed by that team across the rest of the organization. Via Stackdriver APM, Google is clearly hoping to accelerate the rate at which those transition to DevOps occur.

— Mike Vizard