It’s a fast-paced world. Recent research from Microsoft suggests that the attention span of the average human is about 8 seconds now. That means if your application doesn’t work as expected your users will quickly move on to find a suitable replacement. An application performance management tool can be crucial to identifying and resolving application issues as quickly as possible…while you still have the user’s attention.
Stackify introduced APM+ to give .NET developers real-time application performance analysis. Stackify has already established itself as one of the leading vendors of application performance management. Its platform monitors important metrics like CPU, memory, and disk utilization on servers and alerts developers or admins when issues arise. Now it is extending that monitoring to Microsoft ASP.NET environments with APM+.
“The level of real-time app performance and depth of APM+ analytics is unmatched in the market. Not only does Stackify give a complete 360-degree view of how a system is spending its time and where, but it also allows developers to quickly drill down to the heart of the code and see how it can be fixed or improved,” says Stackify CTO, Jason Taylor.
Application performance management in general, and a tool like APM+ specifically, fit neatly with the principles of DevOps. As I noted in a previous article DevOps is “continuous” at virtually every level. There is no beginning or end—no point when an application is completed and deployed and you can kick back and relax. While finishing touches are being put on an app to prepare for a new release a laundry list of changes and updates is already being worked on to develop the next release. There’s no rest for the weary (developers).
There will always be fixes and new features to work on for an app, but application performance management gives you insight into the changes that matter most. Knowing things like which app takes the longest time to load, or which app gets called the most often, or which app is failing the most gives developers a huge advantage that allows them to devote resources where they will have the most impact.
According to a Stackify press release, “APM+ gives developers an increased understanding at every level of an application’s performance and offers code-level profile traces to provide unparalleled system visibility — including method calls, log statements, cache lookups, DB queries, and web service requests.”
Why is that important? A couple reasons stand out. First, you want to be proactive about identifying and resolving issues with your apps. The old-fashioned method of waiting for users to report problems is too slow and reactionary. By that point you already have disgruntled users frustrated with your app.
The second major reason is that a tool like APM+ gives you a streamlined ability to resolve the issue(s) plaguing the app. Rather than a user reporting a problem and developers poking and prodding to investigate what the underlying issue is, APM+ gives developers visibility into metrics and data that enable them to quickly find and fix the problem.
APM+ is focused on the .NET framework initially but Stackify notes that it plans to offer support for a broader range of development languages later this year.