Keys to Performance and Monitoring - Executives' Perspectives

To gather insights for DZone's Performance and and Monitoring Research Guide, scheduled for release in June, 2016, we spoke to 10 executives, from nine companies, who have created performance and monitoring solutions for their clients.

Here's who we talked to:

Dustin Whittle, Developer Evangelist, AppDynamics | Michael Sage, Chief DevOps Evangelist, Blazemeter | Rob Malnati, V.P. Marketing and Pete Mastin, Product Evangelist, Cedexis | Charlie Baker, V.P. Product Management, Dyn | Andreas Grabner, Technology Strategist, Dynatrace | Dave Josephson, Developer Evangelist, and Michelle Urban, Director of Marketing, Librato | Bob Brodie, CTO, SUMOHeavy | Christian Beedgen, CTO and Co-Founder, Sumo Logic | Nick Kephart, Senior Director Product Marketing, ThousandEyes

We asked these executives, "What are the keys to performance and monitoring from your perspective?"

Here's what they told us:

• We’ve moved away from just monitoring having determined that monitoring and performance must become a platform feature from writing code to production so we're able to determine what features are needed or not used. This enables our clients to make smarter decisions. Data from our product can show you why people are not using an app – it may be slow, broken, or just not useful. We don’t just show performance but we also tell the “why” behind performance.
• Quality of the user experience (UX) in the network performance management (NPM) and application performance management (APM) space. Where do you put the agent if you don’t own the server? There used to be monolithic apps but existing agent-based solutions will not support microservices.
• It’s all about tools. We have a small team of five in New York and a team of engineers in Poland. Clients have grown in scope from two or three person teams to 40 to 60-person teams managing the infrastructure and the code bases. We needed tools to manage the servers. We spent the money necessary to integrate with AWS and Chef training. Ultimately we saved money by keeping the team (i.e. overhead) small. This has allowed us to be picky about the talent, skillset and personalities we hire. We’ve taken the time to build teams that can grow clients rapidly. Our team has gone from four to 14 while we’ve gone from having $1 million clients to $100 million.
• We provide visibility and control in three ways: 1) Reduce risk by understanding connection with who and how. 2) Optimize infrastructure for SLA, cost, and responsiveness. 3) Use data to differentiate from the competition. We help identify the best path to act more quickly with low latency. Where are your customers located? How do you handle traffic depending on where they are, the time of day, and the service provider? We provide a picture of what’s happening on the internet. This also impacts how global businesses go to market and where global data centers should be located.
• It’s a dynamic time with the introduction of artificial intelligence. There’s a lot to learn. The challenge is script maintenance. Solve from the outset and adjust as fast as the code changes. We query New Relic to determine slowest end point. We only test what matters. With Google Analytics you have access to usage stats. Ultimately we’ll have automation after development without human intervention.
• Unified monitoring from mobile, web, mainframe to serve to staging the entire customer experience (CX).
• Know your environment to understand how what you are building operates in the real world. You need to understand what you’re trying to monitor. Visualize numbers for clients. Engineering savvy organizations are now more educated and willing to make changes in the way things were done in the past. However, the notion of monitoring and performance is not what it should be.
• Helping customers see internet facing assets and apps they deploy in the WAN. Stitching together a view of applications and the network at once.

What are the keys to performance and monitoring from your perspective?