By: Mohini Jha – Marketing Specialist – Rakuten
As cloud-native landscapes become more complex, organisations have increasingly turned to Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to enhance their digital immunity and ensure better delivery of end-user experiences. But simply having a best-in-class tool is not enough. Most critically, underlying data sets are often disconnected, making it challenging to translate information into actionable insights. To overcome this hurdle, organizations must establish integrated processes that improve data accessibility, application uptime, and customer experience insights. In our latest blog, we will explore the most practical and high-impact techniques you can use to tackle issues and maximize gain from your APM.
- Strengthen APM capabilities within critical customer journeys
Traditionally, IT resiliency efforts focused solely on business-critical applications. However, as components become more interconnected, monitoring multiple applications simultaneously is necessary for proper issue prioritization and resource allocation. Therefore, organizations should shift towards a journey-centered approach. They should quantify the business value of each journey for internal and external customers, identify vulnerabilities and costs associated with system outages, map out critical assets and the single points of failure by journey. For example, an e-commerce company may prioritize critical customer journeys such as product search, shopping cart management, and payment processing. Strengthening the APM within these journeys ensures a seamless experience for customers, minimizing disruptions and maximizing conversions.
- Build an integrated view of the technology environment’s health
The IT monitoring industry offers various vertical-specific and industry-agnostic tools. These tools are categorized into infrastructure monitoring, classic APM, digital-experience monitoring (DEM), and internal-experience monitoring. However, organizations often struggle with integrating alerts across different tools adopted by different teams, leading to a lack of a shared view of integration across tools. Creating a consolidated “single-pane-of-glass view” contextualized by journeys can speed up response times and decision-making, leading to improved resiliency. For example, Rakuten SixthSense Observability offers a single unified platform for end-to-end monitoring of your entire application ecosystem, right from containers to user-experience.
- Build integrated site-reliability-engineering (SRE) and DevSecOps teams
To achieve a single point of truth, organizations need integrated teams consisting of product managers, software engineers, DevSecOps engineers, IT infrastructure professionals, and business stakeholders. These teams can respond to and address alerts for the customer journey and should be closely aligned with product counterparts to continually improve value propositions through infrastructure and operations automation and observability. For instance, technology giant Google has successfully implemented an integrated SRE and DevSecOps approach. Their collaborative teams enable proactive identification and mitigation of potential disruptions, ensuring reliable services.
- Implement chaos engineering and war-gaming techniques
Chaos engineering simulates and tests a system’s resiliency across a comprehensive range of scenarios in an isolated environment. By testing and braking systems with worst-case scenarios, organizations can identify and address weaknesses in their tech stack and be better prepared for actual incidents. This will help organizations to improve their APM capabilities by modifying thresholds proactively and building predictive analytics by linking alerts from different systems or tools. For example, Amazon employs chaos engineering to test the resilience of their services, ensuring that their infrastructure can withstand unexpected disruptions and maintain high availability..
In conclusion, harnessing AIOPs and implementing best practices in APM empowers organizations to improve their IT resiliency capabilities. In a complex landscape of microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and evolving cloud environments, digital leaders of the future will be distinguished by their ability to optimize end-user experiences. By adopting the strategies discussed in this blog, organizations can enhance their APM capabilities, drive innovation, and ensure a resilient and exceptional user experience.
– Co-authored by Amit Srivastava & Mohini Jha