Abstract
English is not my mother tongue. So often it takes a bit
of time for myself to understand few English statements; if it does not contain
regular words. Honestly “PURGE” was one of such word where I had to search for
dictionary.
//PURGE//
Means: To purify, getting rid of whatever that is impure
or undesirable and most important: when you want to start fresh.
How this is related in blog post? Well read on…
What is an APM tool?
One of my customers wanted to do application monitoring during
load test. They started configuring monitoring for their Virtual machines
hosting applications and database for CPU, Memory, network I/O, disk I/O and so
on. Configuration of their monitoring showed them all metrics of VMs like CPU,
memory etc. within 70% however application was failing consistently in load
test.
Then they called me and explained the same scenario and
said application is failing but there is no trace we are getting why it is
failing. So I told them, what you are doing currently is good however you are
doing only underlying “Infrastructure” monitoring. This is good but it can’t
tell always why application is failing. So you need “Application performance monitoring
(APM)” tool for application monitoring.
Folks, application monitoring and infrastructure
monitoring are two different things. If your VM is not healthy then for sure
your application will not work however if your application is not working still
your Virtual Machine might be healthy. Got it?
So when you say I am monitoring CPU, memory for
application you are actually monitoring only underlying infrastructure capacity/
performance and not the application behavior. To monitor application means you
want to understand -
- Application
failures
- Exceptions
and error raised
- User
telemetry and usage
- Availability
of application
- Live
metrics
- Response,
time, latency and application page load time
- Application
load time in client browser
- Dependencies,
slowest operation performed and so on.
This has nothing to do with your underlying
infrastructure performance metrics monitoring.
So you need a tool that can show all above mentioned
things in an application and this is where Application performance monitoring
APM tools are used.
There are many APM tools in the market like NewRelic,
Dynatrace, App Dynamics and “Azure Application Insights”.
So APM is generic concept and Application Insights is a
product from Azure for APM.
Customer Scenario
Some customer can be real pain in the …heart [I know what
you were thinking].
Customer configured application insights agent and SDK
both to monitor various aspects of their few java and .NET based applications for
POC. After running the POC for 15 days they were quite satisfied by application
insights features. They wanted to start using the same application insights
instance in production. However they wanted to start a fresh and hence wanted
to delete all the data captured by application insights till now. At the same
time they also wanted to retain the application insights service and post data
deletion they wanted to start capturing production data in the same service
instance of application insights.
