Tracing, according to Lightstep CTO and co-founder Daniel ‘Spoons’ Spoonhower, provides context, which serves as the backbone for what’s happening when an application’s performance degrades. “Tracing is really just understanding causal relationships in your software,” he explained. “It sounds obvious in retrospect, but using causal relationships to form the way that data is collected, analyzed … continue reading
Application performance monitoring is more important than ever, due to the rising complexity of software applications, architectures and the infrastructure that runs them. When monitoring tools first were developed, the systems they were looking at were fairly simple — it was a monolithic application, running in a corporate-owned data center, on one network. The idea … continue reading
The effectiveness of software development teams has traditionally been measured by their output — how many lines of code did they write today? How many times was code deployed to production. In short, the measure was speed. The idea that they can move code has always been important. But today, organizations are starting to ask … continue reading
It was around late 2017 when we first reported on ‘value stream management‘ as it pertained to software development. By now, everyone knows that value stream concepts were first introduced on manufacturing floors, and were designed to eliminate waste (of effort and materials) and wait times (dependence on others to complete tasks before you could … continue reading
Traditional application performance management was built from the ground up to be for infrastructure operations and the emergent DevOps teams. They were not designed for product and engineering teams. But if you’re a developer, and you’re writing code to deliver to your customers in the form of an application or a service, you’d likely want … continue reading
Observability is the latest evolution of application performance monitoring, enabling organizations to get a view into CI/CD pipelines, microservices, Kubernetes, edge devices and cloud and network performance, among other systems. While being able to have this view is important, handling all the data these systems throw off can be a huge challenge for organizations. In … continue reading
In today’s modern software world, applications and infrastructure are melding together in different ways. Nowhere is that more apparent than with microservices, delivered in containers that also hold infrastructure configuration code. That, combined with more complex application architectures (APIs, multiple data sources, multicloud distributions and more), and the ephemeral nature of software as temporary and … continue reading
The notion of creating value streams to improve organizational efficiency and deliver higher-quality products certainly is resonating at the C-level and mid-management in large enterprises. Yet, uptake among development teams charged with creating those products has been slower to happen. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that value stream management (VSM) … continue reading
Catchpoint today announced it is adding the ability to capture user sentiment to its digital experience monitoring platform. According to Catchpoint’s announcement, the new capability will offer enterprises “broader insights into the overall health and performance” of their applications and services. The offering rounds out the platform, which already performs synthetic, network, endpoint and real … continue reading
Over the years, we’ve written a lot about disaster planning and recovery, the need for backing up systems and business continuity. While many large organizations have their data in redundant locations — either their own data centers or cloud-provided regions around the world, smaller organizations have looked at disaster recovery in the same way they … continue reading
Security has become enough of a drumbeat issue that its importance has trickled down from the CISOs through the security organization to software developers. And slowly but surely, developers are beginning to take ownership of security as a part of the development life cycle. But this heightened awareness of security hasn’t necessarily led to better … continue reading
People have come to expect a certain level of performance from their applications, whether using a consumer application, such as a retail website, or using a business application to get their jobs done. But most monitoring solutions have not adapted to this collapsing of the consumer and business worlds into one, making it difficult for … continue reading
