infoTECH Feature

June 07, 2016

Why Knowing How Your Apps are Performing is 'Mission Critical'

There is an old saying that “you can’t tell the players without a scorecard.”  Put another way, you can’t measure, respond to and control what you cannot see.  And, in what is increasingly a real-time economy, where both our personal and business lives rely more and more on the applications we use, how those applications are performing in a business context has become truly “mission critical.” 

The challenges in a software-centric and applications driven world, where every second counts, revolve around whether the individuals responsible for assuring applications are reliably performing at maximum efficiency and effectiveness have the tools they need to do the job. This only becomes exacerbated by the accelerating needs for cross-functional teams to have access to the information they need from such applications in order to work smarter, faster and create compelling customer experiences.  Unfortunately, realities are that the tools most organizations have in place for monitoring and troubleshooting applications are woefully inadequate for today’s dynamic “E”vironments.

The good news for those facing the exponentially daunting task of properly monitoring and managing application performance is that tools do exist for that enable them to not just keep track in real-time how apps are performing based on pre-defined metrics, but that that a rich set of information about this performance can be turned into actionable insights when performance is degraded or compromised.

The reason for optimism about having real-time visibility and control over application performance  is Sumo Logic’s recently announced industry- first cloud-native machine data analytics platform that is powered by machine learning technology.  It is designed to natively ingest and analyze both structured metrics data and unstructured log data together in real-time.  This means IT now has instant access to the full analytics breadth for modern applications from code to end-user behaviors.

The value of the Sumo Logic platform in terms of its ability to provide unified logs and metrics was the subject of a recent webinar, Break the Silo: Transform Logs & Metrics into Real-time Insights, which is now available for download in case you were not able to participate.  I was joined by Ben Newton, Principal Product Manager, Sumo Logic for the session where topics included were:

  • How the rise of the modern application is changing the way we all work
  • Why you can’t afford to use siloed tools for monitoring and troubleshooting
  • How integrating logs and metrics data can lead to real-time continuous intelligence for richer operational, business and customer insights

There was also a live demonstration of the unified logs and metrics platform.

While the session went into significant details about the value of having a unified next generation platform that enables a holistic view of all application performance, along with the live demo of how it does it,  as an inducement to download the session, the chart below illustrates the value the Sumo Logic approach provides.

Source (News - Alert): Sumo Logic

The value here to note consists of:

  • Full Stack Visibility with Unified Logs and Metrics—the only tool on the market that supports the entire application lifecycle with insight into all machine data.
  • Comprehensive AWS Coverage—comprehensive support for all AWS generated logs and metrics (CloudTrail, ELB, Kinesis, Config, Flow, S3 - now with CloudWatch).
  • Democratized Advanced Analytics—powerful analytics models (Outlier and Predict); and automated and visual interaction model.

The fact of the matter is that now and going forward to really  see and control applications performance a holistic view leveraging an integrated log and metric approach should be part of your arsenal.  What it provides is the ability to collect, visualize and analyze easily and quickly.  In the real-time economy all three of those functions are vital. IT needs to have the best tools to see how things are performing so they cannot just monitor  but manage   what I have characterized in the past as “Infostructure” —the physical and virtual assets and processes upon which the digital world rests—is functioning optimally 24/7/365. 




Edited by Maurice Nagle
FOLLOW US

Subscribe to InfoTECH Spotlight eNews

InfoTECH Spotlight eNews delivers the latest news impacting technology in the IT industry each week. Sign up to receive FREE breaking news today!
FREE eNewsletter

infoTECH Whitepapers