Today’s applications, CI/CD development chains and IT, on premise, cloud and hybrid infrastructures are increasingly complex, so much so that they require a strong and effective response to address this high complexity. The best answer, which is an almost indispensable solution, is to adopt an Application Performance Management strategy. Regardless of the technical aspects, such as the development tools used, the ability to integrate into an existing IT infrastructure, the deployment of resources or performance, the real yardstick when talking about software today is its use. In practical terms, this profitable utilization happens as much as the user can translate software adoption into higher productivity. We could define this value more briefly as User Experience.
Any application today has to deal with several aspects that were negligible in the past:
- Must be able to ensure cross-platform operation;
- It must work with data that is resident in the cloud and, more generally, distributed well outside the perimeter of corporate servers;
- It must be updated regularly, interfering as little as possible with normal activity.
We certainly find these qualities present in an Application Performance Management strategy.
How Application Performance Management investigates software
Blocks, but also just delays, display problems or compatibility are less and less acceptable: the first step to address the issue starts precisely from Application Performance Management. Keeping performance under control from the user’s point of view allows, in fact, to collect that data to be transformed into useful information to intervene where necessary and, as much as possible, in a preventive way. Just to give an example, among the parameters used by Google to determine the ranking of a web page are the server response time and the loading time.
It is easy to see how, from the area of smart working, the discussion also easily shifts to the business context. A first step in this direction is Application Performance Monitoring (APM), i.e. a simple observation of what is happening. This is a useful premise for understanding how and when to move on to a more complex Application Performance Management strategy.
If the problem occurs in front of the user terminal, tracing the origin is certainly complicated. In fact, it involves investigating all the elements involved, potentially very distributed and practically impossible to identify manually. One can then rely on more complete and sophisticated tools, capable of carrying out a code-level analysis. By automatically reconstructing and traversing dependencies between applications and data, these tools can identify weaknesses or bottlenecks.
Looking for the weak point
To slow down the completion of an operation, even a simple error is enough: an image stored on a server that loads more slowly than the other elements contained in a page, a database with unoptimized search functions or simply even a server, physical or virtual, at the limit of capacity. One or more of these causes can give, in the eyes of the user, the impression of performance that is not up to par for an entire application.
To optimise the response times of the final interface, we therefore need tools that can analyse the modes of interaction of the individual elements. If exploited to power a data analytics system, one can even aspire to predictive interventions, anticipating any problems.
The positive repercussions on the User Experience are important and immediate. If previously the end user was the starting point for detecting the quality of performance, thanks to a careful Application Performance Management solution, the same user can be transformed into a test bed for improving the User Experience: if during the optimization interventions or update he will not notice substantial differences, then the strategy will have been successful. The positive repercussions on user satisfaction and the consequent increase and efficiency of productivity are easily predictable.