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

 The data access layer is most likely composed of a SQL Server database and one or more in-memory caching services, and external web services calls. Basic database monitoring is fairly straightforward and handled by most products "out of the box". However, when building an application with instrumentation in mind, it is important to consider what additional information the monitoring platform should capture from either the database or external data service calls. It is recommended the following incremental metrics be used:

• Business relevant metrics such as revenue, user conversion, transaction volume, etc. These metrics enable the use of APM data for business analytics. This information is key to supporting continuous performance improvement at the business level.
• Resource utilization by user or client enables costing at the customer or user level as previously discussed.
• Aggregate application usage metrics help to facilitate both long-term capacity planning and feature utilization pattern analysis.
• External service call frequency and duration for data access by user or client provides valuable insight into the delivery characteristics of third party data and services providers.
• Data cache utilization and performance provides the visibility necessary to determine if the cache client software is effectively utilizing the data cache in place.

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment. Please check back next Tuesday, July 14th for the next blog in this series on front end user interface and web services.