From Trickle to River: How Time-Series Tools Harness Dataflow

The Enterprise Clock: Time is Money

In today’s tech enterprise landscape, data is currency. It’s the most useful asset companies have for smooth business operation, service issue remediation, and optimization. Through increasingly dense real-time analytics, data volume has outstripped human capacity. No person could be expected to parse through the vast analytics collected from products on a daily basis. This is where open-source time-series databases like InfluxData come in, helping teams manage streaming data and monitor virtual, distributed infrastructure across stacks, sensors, and systems. These dynamic tools help teams form adept strategies from copious temporal datasets, all so they can optimize network performance and end-user experience.

Properly utilized data means time and money saved. These are beneficial tools for all levels of an enterprise, from the ITOps and Dev side, to the Executives concerned with the financial bottom-line. InfluxData allows informed execution across teams to ensure best network performance, with scalable tools that emphasize convenience amidst the customary chaos of development cycles and daily maintenance. With larger scale comes more possibilities for slow-downs and outages, and the costs can be astronomical. Unified metrics map performance through time, granting a full scope for application and infrastructure monitoring, giving Ops teams complete visibility into complex, widely-distributed enterprise environments. 

Time-series analytics help teams understand timelines and contextualize dataflow interruptions within the larger network. With increasingly dynamic infrastructure, teams need tools that help them quickly understand complicated systems. Adaptation is an essential skill, where any lapse could mean lost revenue and customers, or damaged industry reputation. 

ITOps: Network Upkeep

Networks are the backbone of all products, applications, and services in our increasingly technological world, and are proving themselves to be one of the most important aspects of tomorrow’s tech landscape. And so, it only makes sense that healthy networks translate to optimal business value in an enterprise company. As much of our tech ecosystems move towards hybrid, cloud frameworks, anomalies and slowdowns are more impactful than ever before, while also being more abstract and difficult to pinpoint.

Network availability, responsiveness, and bandwidth consumption are the three main data points analyzed by InfluxData, giving Ops a comprehensive, integrated look at their networks. As a unified time-series platform, these analytics ensure the best performance possible for your network, so Ops can actually harness massive amounts of data and have confidence in their framework’s operation. In this next section, we’ll make a quick exploration of these three cornerstones of network performance, and show how each pillar is better understood through InfluxData’s indispensable tools.

1. Network availability refers to host reachability, or how easily a query can be fulfilled and traffic can reach its destination. A healthy network has maximal uptime, where end-user traffic is unimpeded. As outages become rarer, analytics tools have begun to focus on slow-downs too, optimizing traffic speeds regardless of load. These analytics reduce the impact of human error on network speeds, smoothly directing queries through InfluxData’s central time-series database into data-processing engine Kapacitor. This engine uses machine learning to detect, repair, and predict anomalies, strengthening the network against problems before they even occur.
2. Network responsiveness consists of latency and packet loss. Latency is the speed it takes for traffic to go through a network to its target, it’s essentially the time interval defining a roundtrip from browser to server. A high latency rate means a slow network. Packet loss defines the rate of error experienced by traffic, caused by glitches in data transmission or network obstruction. InfluxData plots responsiveness in an accessible format, so Ops can know exactly where the problems are happening, and why.
3. Bandwidth consumption metrics show the bandwidth load at the interface. This information can be used as a guiding barometer for alerts so teams can take action before the interface is fully saturated. Bandwidth analytics help Ops predict and prevent slowdowns and congestion, so the network won’t suffer downtime. With InfluxDB, Ops can know their exact data transfer rate and ensure unimpeded data transmission across a network.

DevOps: Navigating the Chaos

InfluxData has proved itself an indispensable tool for DevOps professionals as well. The platform offers a comprehensive, dynamic monitoring framework, granting full stack visibility whether in public or private network infrastructures. Analytics make it easy for professionals to apply their data, instead of straining to squeeze value from a vast, mind-boggling amount of metrics. 

DevOps are able to make sense of the chaos and keep their networks performant and responsive via InfluxDB’s dynamic time-series analytics platform. These metrics help developers monitor emerging technologies like microservices, elastic storage, and hybrid cloud infrastructure, so glitches can be remedied before they impact essential business operations. Influx analytics can even help teams plan for upgrades, allowing them to maximize performance and responsiveness amid shifting infrastructure.

InfluxDB provides these indispensable insights  through a unified monitoring framework. Its accessible, consolidated view eases storage and retrieval of time-series data, even allowing teams to customize plugins that fit their particular environment. Versatile analytics give teams total, real-time visibility into every aspect of their network no matter how distributed. 

These tools come equipped with automation capabilities that use dynamic thresholds, so teams can be immediately alerted to anomalies, and trust their monitoring tools to instantly react. InfluxDB prioritizes a reliable product, so developers can scale tools to their network needs and ensure continuous delivery at every level.

These open-source analytics help enterprises modernize by providing basic, adjustable frameworks to determine and maintain optimal network health. It’s a true democratization of monitoring tools, so companies can benefit from global insights across distributed networks, and optimize their own unique network no matter the size or infrastructure.

A Lighthouse in the Diluvial Night

Unbridled data is about as useful to a company as a wild horse is to a rancher. It’s a beautiful sight to see just how much data we can collect through analytics, but without proper tools we’re left flailing in the mechanical dark with no insight. InfluxData offers machine learning-driven analytics so companies can weather today’s great floods of data. These metrics are like lighthouse signals to tech professionals, helping them navigate increasingly complicated, distributed networks.

An unimpeded network dataflow is essential to a profitable business. To put it succinctly, it’s adapt or drown for tech enterprises. Those who eschew modern tools will only find themselves rudderless in unmanageable waters. InfluxDB analytics make our lives easier, networks healthier, and customers happier, so tech professionals can spend their time wisely instead of floundering in crisis mode with no life raft.

Webinar Marketing Plan: AppDynamics

Link to Slides Presentation

Future-Proofing Through Unified Monitoring: 4 Plays to Make Life Easier

Overview: Humanizing Enterprise Systems

In this webinar series, we discuss a play from the playbook relevant to each persona (with each persona getting an episode) emphasizing that unified monitoring prepares companies for the future while boosting collaboration and success at every level of an enterprise. Ultimately, these tools are about making human lives easier.

First we have an internal expert (fitting the respective persona of the episode) talk about what excites them about our tools, and what challenges these tools solve. Then we have educational conversations between internal and external subject matter experts about the given play.

Narrative

The narrative focuses on how much easier these tools make our lives, whether it means making sense of big data, or boosting human collaboration and enterprise profits. After all, what use are fancy analytics if we can’t understand and apply them?

The message is that AI-powered APM tools allow us to lead more human lives by automating grunt work and granting analytic insight. Technology is here to help us, though change is scary as it is necessary. Companies who adapt will succeed on an enterprise, team, and individual level, and have a better chance faring in the future.

Targeted Buyer Personas and Pain Points

ITOps Managers

These are the people in the daily trenches, troubleshooting performance issues while managing large teams of technical IT professionals. They need something that will save them time while granting maximum front and back-end visibility. 

We frame our APM tools as indispensable for detection, diagnostics, and maintenance in distributed systems of an enterprise scale. Emphasize the AI and machine learning aspects of our tools, and how these technologies streamline enterprise IT processes.

Play: AIOps, as a way for applications to heal themselves before revenue is impacted. As technology progresses, customers expect a flawless experience. This is where human collaboration with AI and machine learning comes in, to pick up the massive slack no team could be expected to manage.

DevOps Managers

DevOps faces problems related to the sheer scale and complexity of their applications, usually entailing cloud integration difficulties across apps, all while contending with the hectic nature of development and release cycles. 

Our tools are about enabling collaboration and making sure developers are confident in each stage of their projects. We explain how these tools help DevOps harness big data while ensuring they’re able to monitor across multi-cloud environments and applications. 

Play: The DevOps play can be a focus point in this episode, where conversations can revolve around the ways APM tools help DevOps manage their workloads.

IT Executives

This persona may not be involved with the daily maintenance and creation as much as the previous two. Still, it’s the Executive’s job to drive profits for their business, while spearheading innovative strategies. 

We convey how financially important and cutting-edge these tools are in an enterprise environment. They predict and prevent service outages, saving vast capital for every crisis averted. The biggest problem is not that system outages happen, but that service slowing over time adds up to lost clients. IT Executives are tasked with the long-term outlook, based on their understanding of new technology.

Play: Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) to emphasize innovative improvements in customer experience. As tech progresses, we move to a customer-centric business model. A happy customer means continuous profit, so it only makes sense that an optimal customer experience means a healthy bottom-line.

Series Episodes

Putting the AI in ITOps: Make the Robots Do It

This will be the ITOps episode. This episode will show how machine learning and AI take the guesswork and anxiety out of application performance management in the IT sphere. AppDynamics’ diagnostic and troubleshooting tools put the AI in ITOps, modernizing and simplifying complex systems, allowing teams to fully understand and maintain their application environments. By tracking the entire journey of each critical transaction, these tools allow quicker, more informed decision-making.

With ITOps, we emphasize there’s no need for tedious remediation and bug-hunting in the modern enterprise app infrastructure, and continuing to work the old-fashioned way is a waste of time and money.

Real-time APM tools give IT teams total visibility, so they can actually use the data gleaned from analytics. We can discuss facets of AppDs’ AIOps tools, including machine learning, performance baselining, anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, and predictive insights. The general message should be that the robots do all the annoying stuff so IT doesn’t have to.

Destroying Data Silos: Wield Truth Through Positive Feedback Loops

This will be the DevOps episode. We show how our DevOps tools support agile software development, fostering a positive, continuous feedback loop with easy integration for application environments. These tools also bridge the gap between teams, eliminating siloed analytics and contextualizing big data for each team. Healthy DevOps means healthy ITOps. APM tools promote harmony between these teams instead of keeping them at odds.

Using APM, DevOps can easily synthesize the technical and business sides of enterprise app environments by mapping transactions to ensure a continuous delivery strategy. These tools foster collaboration and transparency within DevOps teams, making it easy for teams to analyze and improve every stage of the development and release cycle.

DevOps APM tools also lessen the stress of the development process and allow team members to experiment and innovate without blame, making sure teams can get revolutionary products built and operating fast and efficiently. This blameless post-mortem capability improves the human experience for the professionals using these tools, leading to healthier working relationships within their own DevOps teams as well as with ITOps.

Stop Wasting Company Money: 3 Ways APM Boosts Business Success

For the Executive episode, we show how APM contextualizes performance metrics and applies them on an enterprise level to improve customer experiences. Explain how DEM tools map the user’s experience from end-to-end, and also come with the capacity to map performance analytics to overall business goals. 

Digital Experience Monitoring makes it possible for Executives to create scalable strategies for their overarching IT infrastructure. Without APM tools, enterprises are virtually burning money, losing profits to outages and slow performance.

-DEM to improve customer outcomes and experiences, driving loyalty and conversions

-Performance mapping to overall business objectives, with metrics that help translate performance success into business value

-Automated remediation and maintenance via machine learning and AI, so businesses can avoid outages and slowdowns

Webinar Goals

This webinar will synthesize technical information with interviews and human conversations, striking a balance between the technical and accessible. The ideal split would be 20/80 in terms of technical vs conversation, especially since technical education can come through conversation. The webinar also works as an extra promotional tool for the playbook. 

We should strive to be more engaging and personable than technical webinars, while still offering substance that can be further explored with a visit to our playbook or blog. Anybody can grab technical information off the internet, we need to give people a reason to care about the webinar by fostering conversations between industry leaders and offering the playbook for further reading.

Key Performance Indicators

-With Google Analytics and SEMrush, measure organic searches and organic traffic to the site before and after posting the initial promotional blog, as well as before and after posting each piece of the webinar series. See which forms of social media promotion are garnering the most impressions.

 -Compare MQLs before and after the webinar series, and measure the quality of these leads through lead scoring systems.

 -Marketing ROI analysis to determine where the most traffic is coming from, and which promotional efforts are resulting in the most revenue generated

 -Comparing conversion rates pre and post webinar series

Conclusion

There’s an episode based on each of the three personas. We can have a final fourth episode of the webinar integrating a representative of each persona into one conversation, seeing what everyone finds relevant or exciting about AppD’s 4 plays, with the final episode focused on cloud migration. So it would be four episodes total, each released every 2 weeks, with the final episode exploring how APM tools can make each persona’s life easier by freeing integrated systems from reliance on physical servers.

 

Kissmetrics: Thoughtful Marketing for the Modern Consumer

Navigating the matrix

Today, the boundaries between real-life and online are increasingly blurred as we become further plugged in to the digital world. Still, every consumer is a human and humans like to feel appreciated. People respond best to thoughtful, tasteful marketing that’s reasonably customized to their specific needs. Consumers are tired of being treated like a faceless monolith to be exploited. They want to feel valued and well-served with personalized campaigns that are helpful to their needs. They want to be able to trust the companies they buy from. So how can companies be sure to fulfill these necessary expectations and optimize sale fulfillment?

Kissmetrics uses AI to map business insights to sales fulfillment, automatically evaluating which customers will respond most positively to certain marketing strategies. These tools help businesses integrate the intelligence of many departments into assertive strategy, especially when marketing to consumers through popular channels like Facebook.

These tools represent the rise of external marketing strategies to improve the internal relationships between business and consumer. Kissmetrics delivers human experiences in the digital space through approachable campaigns. For its clients, it prioritizes real-time metrics in helping them navigate the matrix of the online marketplace. These insights give businesses a real look into customer behavior, and allow greater predictive decision-making amid the forever ebbing tide of e-commerce.

Engaging consumers through data-driven campaigns

To know the best way to sell their product, companies must know their varied consumer base and what people need. Businesses today need to track how well their marketing is working, or not working, and how their consumers are reacting to, or interacting with, their marketing campaigns. Engagement metrics are a key piece of what Kissmetrics offers, with data-driven targeting and tracking tools that define a company’s consumers in the most human way.

These metrics track patterns of behavior while data insights offer astute guidelines for next steps in a business’s B2B marketing strategy. Kissmetrics automates precise email campaigns to convert consumers from Audiences (identified through Facebook’s own marketing tools) into specialized Populations, whose constituents are defined by their respective behavior. This all works to turn data insights into eventual sales, prioritizing a business’s bottom-line.

These tools can advertise to individuals, through their respective email addresses, with targeted marketing offers that align to their proven buying habits and historical needs. Using this sort of automated behavioral data, Kissmetrics helps companies come up with the best deals to turn one-time customers into repeat consumers. Above all, Kissmetrics offers the capability of customized campaigns for companies whose business depends on an integrated, holistic marketing strategy.

The importance of specificity in today’s online marketplace

Now more than ever, modernization means specialization and specialization means e-commerce success. Companies can’t afford to be playing catch-up in the game of online advertising. Consumers respond best to targeted marketing, as opposed to outdated, homogenous strategies. These tools even moderate themselves, taking buyers out of a certain population once they make a repeat purchase, ensuring that dedicated customers aren’t bombarded with unwanted ads. Kissmetrics helps businesses focus marketing efforts on the most promising customers, while maintaining consumers and not wasting resources on people who are already loyal to the business’s product. Customization is the name of the game, blanket solutions no longer cut it. From the very first steps, Kissmetrics automates consumer engagement based on behavioral analytics. Consumers are unique, and so any successful marketing strategy requires specialized tactics according to personal product engagement.

Consumer populations

Here are three examples of populations you, or any e-commerce vendor, can create the second you get around to it. Ease of use and speedy convenience are the main tenets of Kissmetrics’ tools, and facilitate their utility in the online marketplace.

1. The Windowshoppers

As you can deduce, these are the curious folks who visit your site frequently, but never pull the trigger and make a purchase. Kissmetrics targets interested consumers and helps secure their business with appropriate offers. This automated marketing tool tracks the visitors who aren’t buying, or who are price-shopping through your site. It rewards them for their continued interest, and helps secure them as loyal clients. Again, the e-mail address of an individual is the integral information these tools need to implement specialized marketing strategies. These addresses are typically migrated from email newsletter recipients. These are not people who aren’t interested, after all they’re invested enough to receive personalized updates on your business. Kissmetrics helps transform these customers into loyal consumers of a business’s product, especially once personalized discounts find their way into a could-be consumer’s inbox.

2. The occasionally loyal

For once-customers who have wandered away from a business’s product though still browse, Kissmetrics tracks their buying habit data, and delivers personalized offers based on past purchases and frequency. Users of this tool can set approximate metrics to track just how long it’s been since a semi-frequent customer has bought something. Kissmetrics then collates the data from these email addresses and presents offers according to a consumer base’s particular needs. Kissmetrics clients are then notified of consumer updates through automated alerts via Slack, cutting down response time and increasing the likelihood of a sale. Marketing power, efficacy, and strategic success are achieved through the specificity of a campaign, especially in today’s ever-competitive marketplace.

3. Scorned lovers

These are the loyal customers who have definitively taken their dollar elsewhere. And that’s okay, it happens. As is inevitable in any business, consumers move on, find better prices, or reduce their need for a specific product. Kissmetrics tracks these consumers, who have built your business, and suggests best steps to win them back, or at least to keep the population from increasing.

Happy consumer, happy life

Kissmetrics strives to secure customers through personalized, thoughtful advertising, delivering deals sweet as embrace at a percentage of original product cost, showing consumers they are valued and well-served. It rewards loyal customers, while using specialized data to gauge what it will take to bring new and old customers back to a business’s store.

Most importantly for our company’s clients, Kissmetric’s organizational infrastructure segments relevant customers in a way that makes all consumer populations easier to understand and better serve. The convenience for clients translates to ease of use for our client’s customers, and prioritizes the use of specialized marketing strategies to boost revenue. Kissmetrics promises businesses the benefits of intelligent marketing campaigns.

Vapid mass-marketing was phased out long ago, as proven marketing strategies evolve with an emphasis on organizational specificity. Customer’s behaviors and needs evolve over time, they are anything but static, especially with the advent of the online marketplace. Kissmetrics is advertising with a sense of logic, empathy, and thoughtfulness. Above all, it helps businesses best serve their various consumer-bases without making customers feel like just another number in the matrix.

Samsara: Using AI to reduce shipping cost while improving road safety

A new age in shipping

Samsara strives to modernize the shipping industry by using AI and other new technologies to strengthen road safety, significantly improving one of the most dangerous facets of mass transport. Their AI-driven dash-cams can even prevent animal collisions, which not only damage protected populations of wildlife, but rack up a heavy annual toll in maintenance and cleanup costs. Animal collision’s annual impact on public health is astounding, with 26,000 non-fatal injuries and 200 deaths reported yearly. These sorts of accidents are entirely preventable considering new technological capabilities in artificial intelligence.

Safety first

My dad dreamed of these days. His persistent warnings about cars, highways, and parking lots still echo in my daily use of transport. “Be smart, look both ways, assume everyone else is a moron that isn’t paying attention!” I used to think it was typical paternal paranoia, but he was right, cars (and the negligent drivers piloting them) are incredibly dangerous. Car accident death probability is exceeded only by opioid deaths. The pharmaceutical epidemic is more or less a disease our culture has given itself through regulatory negligence, while road deaths are just a horrible byproduct of clogged infrastructure and human error. Transport is necessary, but holds terrifying implications when one considers the 1.2 million lives lost to car accidents annually.

 

Too many of us have lost loved ones to this plague on public safety, the Driver’s Ed slideshows seared into our adolescent memories, grotesque gore and warped pieces of metal wrapped around telephone poles. It’s scary, it’s pervasive, and it doesn’t have to be this way. Samsara seeks to reduce this deadly yet necessary facet of everyday life, applying tech innovations as safeguards against preventable collisions. The company works toward a vision of superior, data-driven road safety. This just may be one of the most sensible and productive applications of AI and machine learning in recent memory. Nothing is more relevant, or of more widespread utility, than being safe while getting from one place to another.

Multi-faceted use potential

From governmental regulatory utility, to private daily life assistance, or improved shipping capabilities, AI has an incredible potential to transform the way we travel. It holds the possibility of making car accidents a rarity, instead of a morbid everyday reality. AI dashcams are comparatively inexpensive and less labor intensive than huge highway construction undertakings or even roadside fencing. Ultimately, these dashcams work to reduce accident cost impact on shipping fleets and their respective companies. They offer data on driving violations through continuous scene analysis, and provide drivers with real-time updates and smart alerts for potentially reckless driving; these cams can even automatically detect tailgating and notify drivers when they’re getting too close to other cars.

 

Using computer vision capabilities, the cams update speed limit maps automatically, so drivers always know the legal speed of any given region. These computer vision tools can interpret road scenes and traffic configurations in real-time to provide drivers with the best methods of risk-reduction. Machine learning processes thousands of hours of cam footage for anomalous occurrences, continuously refining itself in response to danger points in particular regions, granting fleet managers the ability to best guide and advise their drivers in the most unsafe conditions. Samsara even automatically visualizes trend maps for fleet managers, to give the most exact picture of company road safety and driver performance. These sorts of technologies have already begun to be implemented around the world with great success.   

Traffic: from daily frustration to anomalous rarity 

Samsara takes the guesswork out of the most unforeseeable events, forecasting problems before they occur and offering drivers and managers alike the capability to not only be safe, but economical as possible. These cams strive to secure and protect the financial bottom-line of shipping companies, guaranteeing an inexpensive, low-impact solution to a problem that’s existed as long as cars have. AI is even purported to be a tool in reducing or even ending traffic jams. I don’t know about you, but a lack of traffic, especially in metropolitan centers, sounds heavenly, almost too good to be true. My occasionally irate father would agree. These are the utopian-esque possibilities offered by AI, and roads will only become safer, and less frustrating to navigate, the sooner that these tools are integrated with the shipping sector.

Taming New Galaxies Through AI: The Age of Automation and Strategic Decision-Making

      Cloud computing is projected to net over $40 billion in consumer revenue by 2020, with nearly half of enterprise companies spending $50 million annually on cloud infrastructure. Its success signifies an emphasis on ease, eliminating cumbersome servers and consolidating huge storage structures into virtualized spaces. The sheer scale of distributed systems within the cloud makes reliable app performance difficult, yet vital to ensure. Again we’re greeted by the woes of innovation, where new management challenges accompany the flexibility, efficiency, and strategic value of the cloud.

       The size of these sophisticated ecosystems and their resulting data cannot be overstated. They may be better termed “galaxies”, requiring astronomic levels of work to manage by hand, let alone to apply their metrics strategically. It’s easy to feel the looming pressure of inundation when taming data of this magnitude, so monitoring tools have only become increasingly necessary.

       Cloud is an easy way to manage and organize large-scale IT operations, and AIOps tools are an easy way to monitor and manage application performance before, during, and after cloud migration. When chosen appropriately, these APM tools help prevent service disruptions, executing urgent maintenance in real-time. The cloud’s obvious advantage is its promise of elastic scalability at a low price. But cloud isn’t just a management advantage. It’s also a UX tool that ensures a seamless, streamlined end-user experience, only further driving positive business outcomes.

Makin’ It Rain: Cloud Migration for Improved Business Performance

       There are many steps to consider when choosing an App Performance Monitoring tool for migration. The chief concern should be re-architecting one’s applications to cloud compatibility, and ensuring these apps work on the server side as well as the cloud. Another priority should be strategy and adequate planning to ensure proper execution, perhaps more important than the move itself. Other concerns include reducing downtime, staying within budget, and minimizing performance impact.

        ITOps must also decide whether they need a public or private cloud platform. Though private cloud systems are slowly becoming peripheral to the public cloud, they can be difficult to re-architect for, may have limited use as a standalone storage, and must be more closely managed by companies themselves.

       As noted by Forrester, enterprise companies are set to modernize their legacy apps in 2019, eagerly adopting cloud wherever possible. In the midst of digital transformation and major shifts in the cloudscape, how can you ensure your app’s smooth transition? After all, APM tools are not one-size-fits-all.

      Fortunately, performance monitoring no longer has to be a shoddy ark bobbing through the turbulent deluge of data. Here’s a quick checklist of common Ops problems within the context of cloud migration, to help us evaluate the best enterprise APM tool to choose as the world turns cloud.

1. Performance Issues: Glutton of Time, Money, and Customers

       The chief difficulty of enterprise software implementation and cloud migration lies in how time-consuming it can be for ITOps to piece together cross-functional solutions to performance issues. Teams have understandably found it increasingly mind-boggling to manually maintain such vast ecosystems. As tech and metric acuity improve, we involve more components, denser environments, and increased uptime traffic. A higher load means there’s a higher risk of service disruptions and serious outages. This is especially troublesome for enterprise businesses that ensure automatic delivery and performance.

      A good APM tool uses AI to automate the more tedious troubleshooting and remediation. Machine learning can even predict and prevent problems before they arise, altering itself dynamically in response to anomalies. After all, there’s a lot at stake in terms of outages. Not only do they reduce customer retention, statistics show the cost of a single outage to average nearly half a million dollars, confirming their negative business impact to be anything but negligible.

      2. Mo’ Transactions Mo’ Problems: Cloud Migration and Key Business Transactions

      A business transaction encompasses all the services called upon to complete a user request. Many applications are involved in the simplest actions, which is why total, efficient monitoring of every level within an environment is essential to optimal performance. This becomes especially crucial when you add the extra layer of migration complexity.

       The most effective APM tools detect business transactions automatically, then generate visual aids like topology maps to provide exhaustive, comprehensive end-to-end threads. If an important business transaction starts lagging behind baseline performance, code-level diagnostics should tackle the problem head-on through root cause analysis, deploying agents and offering post-repair analytics. ITOps must be able to understand exactly where performance issues are coming from, and how to prevent them. Otherwise, performance issues will impact business transactions, in turn affecting overall business.

3. Ghosts in the Machine: Lack of Backend Visibility

       With myriad apps to maintain during cloud migration, it can be exceedingly difficult for teams to achieve cross-functional visibility. Beyond that, end-user visibility is just as important as internal. Teams need to know what’s working and what isn’t on the backend, so they can facilitate a flawless customer experience. Traditionally, professionals had to hear about bugs from clients themselves, then hurtle into the backend abyss and hope they find something. APM tools driven by AI hold the promise of preventative analysis and action, with their unified monitoring approach offering complete transparency within an ecosystem.

       A good APM tool should grant ITOps teams maximum visibility, and be capable of analyzing vast swaths of user data and backend code for performance optimization, all in real-time. Well-chosen APM tools grant visibility, making intimidating environments easier to navigate and maintain, on both sides of the product.

Top APM Tools to Help You Traverse the Cloud Confidently

1. AppDynamics APM

      Repeatedly named a leader in monitoring software by Gartner, AppDynamics’ APM is an enterprise cloud monitoring tool that bridges the gap between app performance and business strategy to tackle an abstract problem. It uses AI, machine learning, event correlation, and big data analytics to monitor across an entire environment from the most significant to minute components.

      Primarily, this APM boasts exemplary reporting and alerting tools, relying on a unified monitoring approach. Its Cognition Engine uses real-time monitoring to eliminate time-consuming troubleshooting, deploying agents once an anomaly is detected within labyrinthine lines of code. These agents hold a low production impact, designed to facilitate performance instead of hinder further. This all relies on dynamic baselining as opposed to static thresholds, where baseline performance continually alters itself in response to performance metrics.  

      As anomalies are encountered, they’re logged and used to predict and prevent future bottlenecks before they even occur. This APM tool automates the annoying stuff, so Ops doesn’t have to do the monotonous legwork themselves.

      Tools like Continuous Delivery and dynamic updates guarantee a fast MTTR in the event of any release issues, eliminating much of the anxiety for big releases or migrations. Performance metrics are then mapped to business objectives, achieving a holistic scope for overall business optimization. So not only does it automate remediation, it also grants enhanced decision-making capability for businesses as a whole, so they can take informed steps confidently without relying on guesswork.

      Most importantly, it keeps the customer happy, functional, and profitable. AppDynamics tracks business transactions through Transaction Tracing tools, then generates automated flow maps to help teams know the exact path of a request. It emphasizes the end-to-end performance of an environment, enabling code-level, infrastructure, and network visibility across teams.

      The system even promises enhanced control and visibility for IaaS/PaaS platforms like Microsoft Azure or AWS. It works in an array of languages, and scales easily to any environment with some of the most flexible, speedy deployment options in the industry.

2. AWS X-Ray

      In the midst of such success for cloud platforms, Amazon decided it needed a piece of the sky. Its APM tool X-Ray monitors performance across distributed applications in the cloud. X-Ray operates through an adaptable scale, able to manage microservice architecture, aggregating data across applications and giving quick insights to performance issues.

       As with other products, it offers hybrid cloud adaptability, and end-to-end tracing. X-Ray lacks the AI tools and acute reporting offered by other APMs, but is fairly adequate for most smaller-scale use cases.

3. Instana Dynamic APM

      Instana Dynamic offers an APM most useful for micro-level scale, specializing in casino and sports betting services as a 24/7 monitoring tool. This APM executes visualization and performance analysis of a system’s full-stack, and is especially useful for migrating monoliths to cloud microservices. This APM is sufficient for smaller scale implementation, though some reviews claim it could have a better UI, and is once again comparatively lacking in AI reporting tools.

Sky’s the Limit

      Amidst such nebulous ecosystems, picking the right cloud monitoring tool can be intimidating, even for the most knowledgeable professionals. ITOps must keep strategy in mind as well as app performance, and choose an APM that maps and contextualizes performance metrics within the bigger picture of business outcomes.

      Teams need maximum visibility within intricate environments, so they can track business transactions exactly. The more exhaustive the analytics and diagnostics, the easier it is to understand the root causes of convoluted anomalies, and how they impact not only whole environments, but the business itself as it migrates to cloud.

      Ideally, a team’s chosen tool uses AI to automate the petty, repetitive bug-hunting and maintenance drudgery, so ITOps can use their valuable time to its full potential. In modernizing applications to the cloud, the sky’s the limit for business outcome optimization. If companies want to survive and thrive in today’s cloudscape, they must choose tools wisely to ensure they aren’t left waving from the launchpad. Life’s too short to stay earthbound.