Not Everyone Is An Application Expert

The majority of people in IT are specialists

The majority of people in IT are specialists. Even though applications are the living breathing entities of the business, very few people in IT truly have an understanding of the application as a whole rather, they understand one small part of whats necessary to make it function, like the infrastructure, the database, or the network. No one is expected to understand the entire application, because the application is usually too huge and encompasses so many parts that to do so would be difficult, even impossible.

Unfortunately for the business, this becomes a problem when the people who are responsible for the applications performance and availability are not application experts. Theyre not stupid their skill sets span many technologies and platforms that underpin applications, and often include networks, databases, storage and virtualization. However, while operations monitors the health of these infrastructure components, they often get bombarded with complaints about slow performance that have more to do with the application and not the infrastructure beneath. IT infrastructure monitoring is not enough anymore; an application context is necessary to understand where and why the application is failing.

The good news for operations is that there are web application performance monitoring tools available that can provide the missing link between the poor performance of an application and the developers that created it. With this kind of application monitoring software operations can get the evidence they need to report back to development the exact line of code where something went wrong. This can bridge the gap between ops, which knows the infrastructure and the performance but not the application code, and dev, which writes the code but never gets to see how it performs in production.

Some care must be taken in selecting an Application Performance Management (APM) tool, however. Legacy APM solutions often require a good deal of configuration that must be performed by someone who is, essentially, an application expert. It doesnt matter how powerful the APM solution is if a high level of configuration is required to make it work that kind of APM only knows as much as the user that set it up. Furthermore, this kind of APM tool quickly becomes out of date as developers push new code to production, which requires ops to again configure the application to expand their visibility.

The next generation of APM tools, however, dont require (or shouldnt require) their users to be experts in every facet of the application. They automatically detect and instrument the components of your application and correlate the business transactions. A real APM tool should solve application complexity, not create it.

Operations doesnt fully understand the application they support, and they shouldnt have to. IT is full of specialists for a reason; there are too many diverse components involved in an application for a single person to comprehend. And thats fine with the right software, you dont need an expert to keep things humming along.

by: joseph

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