Concerns Around Performance and Monitoring

To gather insights for DZone's Performance 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 your biggest concerns around performance and monitoring?"

Here's what they told us:

• The need for more customers to recognize the importance of performance - performance as a feature. Every 100 milliseconds you improve performance there is a 1% improvement in conversion.  DevOps has been good at helping people understand that performance is a feature that can be used to steer software engineering.
• Lack of client understanding and lack of a holistic approach to, and view of, performance. People understand elements of performance but very few understand the end-to-end experience. We need more education around web performance. Everyone has a niche but there’s not enough regimen and certification.
• As tools become more powerful and complex they become harder to use and you have to hire people to manage the tools. A lot of performance monitoring tools have a layer on top for simplicity of use.
• Identify the level of information that is needed to run the network and provide a good user experience. Millions of tools are available. Clients don’t want to just know there’s a problem, they want to know how to mitigate it and see what happened. Be able to drill into users on multiple networks so the level of micro-outage can be identified and addressed.
• None really. There’s a strong suite of tools. Most are open source and there are some proprietary. We use JMeter in load testing and support. Now it’s about patterns and practices. Streamline habits and strategies, document practices and patterns.
• Ability to connect the dots and do it at scale in a development and production environment. Keep production performance very fast. Ensure adding an agent doesn’t affect performance. Standardization of how apps evolving and how the community is evolving. How to share data and interoperability? How well do these tools we're creating play together for clients and end users?
• There are still a lot of companies that do not view performance and monitoring as integral to the development process.
• The growth of data and the machines across which we track the data.

What concerns do you have about the current state of performance and monitoring?