What counts in today's application economy is a good customer experience. Application performance management (APM) tools enable this by allowing issues to be resolved quickly, and supporting the delivery of 'five-star' apps.
Duncan Bradford VP, Presales, CA Technologies EMEA, says five-star apps, named by the rating systems on app marketplaces, address both business and client needs and provide a high-quality user experience, with a smooth and seamless navigation.
"The application environment we see today includes a complex array of microservices, application program interfaces (APIs) and containers across mobile, cloud and on premises. To deliver a good user experience you need application monitoring that is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative."
CA recently introduced APM 10, he says , "essentially allowing non-expert users to identify problems themselves, rather than having to call in developers and administrators to become involved at the first sign of an issue".
Ethnographic research'
He says when designing APM 10, CA realised the old way of solving application performance problems wasn't working, and merely visualising the complex data in a different way wouldn't solve the problems.
With this in mind, CA began a research project, which was carried out by observing real people in their place of employment, to pinpoint consistent problems. Bradford describes the approach as 'ethnographic research' or 'cultural anthropology'. "We spoke to many customers, both our own, and some of our competitors. We wanted to hear their stories and watch them working on real issues in their unique environments."
The research was then analysed and from their distinct problems, CA identified eight 'personas' who were given names such as Pete, Karl and Ryan.
"We have ongoing conversations with our designers and engineers about our various users and what they are really trying to accomplish. We wanted to focus on solving the problems these users face every day. We realised that APM needed to be easier, more proactive, intelligent and collaborative. We are not completely there yet, it's a journey. But these 'personas' help us make APM easy for each specific user, by understanding their specific problems."
Three challenges
CA also needed to address three main challenges - complexity, change and noise. "To address complexity, we added 'perspectives' that are essentially role-based views that allow users to 'pivot' and show the environment from their unique perspective.
By using various attributes such as location, application, business unit or any other organisational construct, users can quickly reorient and filter complex views into simple perspectives. In this way, the issue can be identified, without having to call in a plethora of experts.
In terms of change, Bradford says APM 10 introduced the ability for the user to view his or her application via a timeline that can be represented by events, quality, or attributes - for example a new release of software that might cause an issue.
In terms of noise, he says the company sought to fix the 'how red is red' problem. "In any IT organisation, you will see various products, and each product has a dashboard. Suddenly there's a screen full of alerts. They are critical, and the majority of users won't know which is the most critical unless they have a team of data scientists working on the problem."
APM 10 has added context and differential analysis that works better than traditional baselines. "It identifies instability in your app and warns the user that it may not be at alert stage yet, but is acting in an anomalous way. Essentially, this feature is replicating what a real human can do - identify any apps that are showing signs of instability. These potential alerts can be kicked up to the experts to solve if needed."
Bradford says applications are the face of the organisation and users have a plethora of choices. Apps can be rejected in a matter of seconds if they don't work properly. The challenge for businesses wishing to weather this digital disruption is to make their applications become the ones users stay with because they enjoy the experience.
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