This is the second entry in a 10-Series Blog post every Wednesday in regards to Software-Plus-Services: Application Instrumentation, Stress Testing and Production Management.

Application instrumentation is the means to monitor and report the performance of an application. This instrumentation is done by using a combination of internal and external observation methods. Internal counters can be provided by the underlying operating system and by the application layer itself. External counters are typically used to measure end-user experience and other external environmental metrics. It is critical to combine internal and external measures into a single repository to maximize the business value of monitoring. Very rarely do organizations look at the operational and business needs during the initial phases of application instrumentation instead they look primarily at the needs of the software engineering team. This is a highly inefficient approach. Based on experience with a number of applications at various stages of development and deployment, a best practices approach has been developed that satisfies all three sets of requirements. A standard method for applying instrumentation allows engineering and operations to "speak" the same support language. This approach allows these groups to work in tandem to proactively resolve service problems much faster and provide better value to the business.

At a high level, the approach is simple. The groups standardize on the same instrumentation technology. Using a flexible, cost effective SaaS-based APM monitoring platform like Absolute Performance's System Shepherd®, the development staff can quickly deploy monitoring and performance visualization across their pre-production environments. An inheritance-based configuration scheme should be employed to enable seamless migration of monitoring configurations from the pre-production environments into the production environment. Likewise, meaningful performance measurements collected in the production environment are immediately familiar to software engineering personnel for side-by-side comparison with their development/test environment. The areas of critical application instrumentation are illustrated in the following diagram.

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving your comments in the comment section below and be sure and check back next Wednesday, July 8^th , Tuesday, July 7th, for the third blog post in this series on backend processing component instrumentation.