APM: Let you see the application at a glance

The golden rule of IT application design and development. However, for a specific application, pursuing the best user experience requires overcoming so many difficulties, which makes "pursuing the best user experience" an empty talk in many cases.

Users cannot log in, web pages cannot be opened, mouse clicks do not respond for a long time... These are common problems we encounter when using computers, but they are not easy to solve because these seemingly simple applications often involve many aspects. For example, the hardware involves user terminals, servers, storage, etc., and the software involves operating systems, middleware, databases, etc., as well as the operator's network, etc. Any problem in any of these links will lead to a poor user experience. What makes this problem even more complicated is that in today's Internet environment, more and more applications are communicating through APIs or Web services, which makes everything even more difficult.

In the past, the solution to these problems was highly dependent on the personal experience of application developers and operation and maintenance personnel. Therefore, talents in this field have always been in short supply in the market. It was not until the emergence of APM (Application Performance Management) that the shortage of such talents was slightly alleviated.

In fact, APM is not a new concept. There are many such software in the market, such as Compuware, CA, etc., whose products are well-known in this market. However, these software are complex and expensive, and are typical "high-end" products that are not affordable for ordinary "diaosi" level enterprises.

"Compared with traditional APM, the cost for enterprises to purchase APM services may be as low as about 30%. At the same time, its deployment is also easier and the threshold for enterprises to use is much lower." Lu Xinghai, product director of Cloud Wisdom, told reporters.

The vacuum in the market has left enough room for the new generation of APM. With the popularization of cloud computing and mobile applications, a number of APMs in the form of SaaS services have appeared on the market. Due to the adoption of a series of cloud computing-based innovations (such as big data-based analysis) and a lower consumer threshold, SaaS-based APMs are very popular in the market. The large investments from investors have further fueled the trend, making this market extremely lively.

New Relic is one of the pioneers of SaaS APM. Founded in 2008, this American company went public at the end of last year, and its market value has reached 2 billion US dollars. The old APM company Compuware was also acquired at a high price of 2.5 billion US dollars. Inspired by these wealth creation myths, a group of new APM forces such as Cloud Wisdom and Tingyun have emerged in the Chinese market, and their growth rate is astonishing.

"The SaaS model APM collects user-side data through SDK, network data through monitoring points, and various software and hardware environment data on the server through probes. It then uses big data technology to quickly diagnose and analyze the collected data, identify bottlenecks that affect application performance, and provide diagnostic suggestions," said Gao Chitao, head of the Cloud Wisdom Architecture Group.

He told reporters that the various SaaS model APM vendors on the market are basically the same in terms of technical implementation, but they have different design concepts. Different design concepts will also determine how far they can go in the market. As a rising star in the APM market, Yunzhihui released its SaaS model APM perspective treasure at the end of last year. "Yunzhihui's APM is truly business-oriented and end-to-end integrated application monitoring. By injecting probes into the user's server, it can achieve penetration from the user's front-end to the back-end physical server and code level. Because it can be refined to each real behavior of each user, fault location can be deep into the code level, making it possible to deeply locate the problem." Gao Chitao said.

According to reports, Chuitoubao pioneered a business-oriented, user-behavior-based application performance management solution, that is, analyzing application performance based on real user behavior. Its continuous investment in venture capital is also related to the forward-looking technical advantages and good market prospects of this product.

Gao Chitao explained the meaning of "business-oriented". He gave an example, saying that if one of the four servers in a MySQL database cluster crashes but the system performance is not greatly affected, the system will not alert the business personnel, and the alarm information will only be notified to the operation and maintenance personnel. "Because the end user cannot feel the impact of the crash, the business personnel do not need to care about this situation, but after all, the crash has occurred, so the operation and maintenance personnel must be informed in time. This is the role of our system's hierarchical alarm function." He explained.

Another major feature of Perspective is its unique Smart Agent. It is reported that most APMs are probes (Agents) that can only monitor a certain version of an application. Therefore, when deploying, users have to deploy many probes to cooperate, making it difficult to deploy in batches. However, Perspective uses automated smart probe technology, which only requires the deployment of one probe (Cloud Wisdom calls it a "shell"), which will automatically download and deploy the required probes according to demand.

"Technically, different SaaS APM models compete to a large extent on the capabilities of their probes, and these probes are the key to realizing different functions," said Gao Chitao.

In addition to increasing its technology research and development capabilities, Cloud Wisdom is also making plans for its own APM, which is to achieve platformization of products, and one of the specific measures is open source.

"Opening up our products to attract more third-party platforms to develop their own products and services based on Perspective, thereby creating an ecosystem based on Perspective. This is our ideal development model." Gao Chitao said that this is a long process and it has just begun, but the direction has been determined.