The 7 P’s Of Deploying Apm Like A Rockstar

By Author: Joseph Mathew
Total Articles: 11
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A co-worker of mine shared some words of wisdom with me a long time ago which have served me well over the years. It’s a little saying called the 7 P’s and goes something like this…

Piss Poor Planning Promotes Piss Poor Performance.

Deploying and using application performance monitoring software is not a time for spontaneity or just winging it. If you want to be a rockstar you need a solid plan for deploying, configuring, verifying, operationalizing, using, and evangelizing your web application monitoring tool.

The planning stage is a perfect time to ask your APM vendor for documentation on best practices related to deploying their software. Your vendor has seen their software deployed in many situations across many industry verticals. They will have important advice for you on how to make the deployment and operation of their product as successful as possible. Use your vendor’s depth and breadth of information ...
... to your advantage – you’re paying them, so it’s the least they can do.

The Controller:

The first major decision will be an easy one. You probably already covered this during the evaluation, vendor selection, and negotiation phases but we will recap here. You need to decide if you will host your own controller or use the vendor’s SaaS environment. There are many factors that you need to consider when deciding to use a SaaS or On-Premise model and we will not cover them in this post..

SaaS:

You don’t have to get a server racked, VM allocated, disk space configured, solve a Rubiks Cube in 3 minutes or less, or whatever other convoluted deployment process your company may have in order to host your own software. All you really need to do is point your agents at the SaaS controller and you are off and running.

On-Premise:

So you’ve decided to host your own controller(s). In this case the vendor won’t be doing all of the work for you so you need to get cracking on your server deployment process. It may take you a few weeks or even months to get that going, so you need to be familiar with the lead time so that you can appropriately plan the rest of the deployment.

Agents: Deploying and Configuring

Agents need applications to do anything meaningful so it’s a requirement that you figure out what applications you want (or will be allowed) to monitor. You most likely had at least one problematic yet important application in mind when you started your search for an APM or java profiling tool. Create a list of the applications that need monitoring and prioritize that list. I personally prefer creating a top 10 list that is an equal mix of applications I suspect will be difficult to instrument as well as applications I think will be really easy.

Congratulations! You have planned out your deployment of your APM tool. You’re most of the way there!