Exclusive interview with Bo Rui Meng Xidong: "Active" APM is closer to local needs in China

2015: The first year of APM in China

As we all know, the development of big data, cloud computing, social media technologies such as Web 2.0, and the prosperity of e-commerce, the Internet, and retailers have brought unprecedented challenges and opportunities to APM.

In fact, as early as 2008, many foreign Internet-based enterprises have begun to use APM solutions. It is not a new concept. Why did it take until 2015 for APM to enter people's vision and receive widespread attention in the industry in China? What changes has APM brought to the operation, maintenance and management of enterprises?

With these questions, 51CTO reporter interviewed Meng Xidong, CTO of Beijing Borui Hongyuan Technology Development Co., Ltd. Let us follow Mr. Meng to solve these mysteries one by one.

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Borui Director and CTO Meng Xidong

Meng Xidong, founder, director and CTO of Borui, is fully responsible for Borui's strategic planning and operational management. In January 2008, Meng Xidong left Qianlong to found Borui. After more than seven years of development, Borui has become a leading pioneer in domestic AMP application performance management.

Why do we need APM?

First, from a management perspective. The technical department is the last line of defense in all companies. A company's technical department has different modules such as R&D, operation and maintenance, and front-end development. When problems arise, such as users being unable to access the system, they basically go to operation and maintenance first. However, many problems are actually not related to operation and maintenance, which not only prolongs the entire problem-solving cycle, but also has the potential to increase the severity of the problem.

Meng Xidong told us that although enterprises have multiple monitoring systems to monitor their business, they are basically monitoring within the firewall, which is a "bottom-up" solution. All our monitoring systems believe that after the host is built, the entire system is good. But it cannot directly obtain the data generated by real customers when they visit. The actual network situation is far more complicated than we imagined, which also causes differences between the monitored data and the real customer access data.

The reason why APM can solve problems is that it changes the previous way of solving problems from "empiricism" to truly speaking with data. APM turns the fluctuations in business operation performance into quantifiable data, objectively reflecting our technical level, thus helping operation and maintenance personnel to clearly know where the problem is, rather than guessing, greatly improving the efficiency of problem solving.

There are also benefits from an operational perspective. Meng Xidong described the role of APM as "increasing revenue and reducing expenditure." Through the data provided by APM, operations personnel can clearly know the status of their actual customer support visits, and thus determine which regions of customers have no problems with the current products. At least before doing publicity and activities, test whether there are any problems with your access in these areas, so as not to waste money. This is very helpful for operations and can guarantee a higher efficiency in the business promotion of applications.

APM can help with competitive product analysis. No matter what we do, there will be competitors, and Borui certainly needs to know what the competitors are like now. Meng Xidong introduced that through APM data, we can know a lot of technical data, such as CDN usage, the size and location of the computer room, etc. We can see the entire technical situation clearly, which is very valuable to us.

In summary, APM does not simply provide management tools for technical personnel, but also promotes the entire Internet business model. Whether from technical operations, product operations, to the entire system, each link of the work will have better results.

Since APM solutions have so many advantages, why haven't we seen it being widely accepted by the Chinese people, at least for now? Speaking of this, Meng Xidong mentioned to us the concepts of "active and passive" of APM.

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Active vs. passive: two models of APM

How should we understand the active and passive types of APM? Meng Xidong specifically said that the passive type can be understood as "invasive", and the active type corresponds to "non-invasive".

Most of the APM solutions we have seen so far are passive, that is, invasive, which means that you need to install something on your server and in your system, which is what we know as a "probe". The advantage of this method is that when a problem occurs, it can be discovered in time and the problem can be located. This method is easier to accept abroad, but at least for now, Chinese people's minds are not so open. They only focus on whether there is a risk when the "probe" is installed on my machine? This risk may come from various levels of risk, so it is still difficult to accept. In addition, it requires the cooperation of the other party's technical personnel to implant the corresponding program into you before you can collect performance data. Active monitoring can systematically find and analyze problems in the production environment and effectively optimize applications. The problems that passive monitoring can find are often hidden in the production environment and will only be exposed when a specific application combination is triggered or user access behavior is concentrated.

Seeing these aspects, Borui decided to focus on the field of active APM. Meng Xidong believes that this is actually an update in concept, because active APM solves problems from top to bottom, which is lighter and faster. For example, when a user visits a website, no matter what the underlying layer is, as long as the website opens normally within a reasonable time, it is considered to be fine. If it opens slowly, it is considered to have problems. This is the same as the user experience. Therefore, active APM is indeed the closest to users, and it collects data from the most real users.

However, when locating the problem, you may fall into a misunderstanding or a black box, because I have not installed anything on your server, so I don’t know what your server is like at that time. Therefore, when actively locating the problem, it is based on "blocks" rather than "points". But this monitoring method is easier for existing domestic technical field customers to accept.

But this does not mean that it will affect the monitoring and solving of problems. Meng Xidong vividly gave an example, "It's like a blood test. It depends on how detailed you monitor. Each type has similar alternative methods. It depends on whether you want to know the real access experience of external users? Do you also want to know how the code of the application I support runs? See what effect he wants to achieve in the end, and what is the difference in changing to positioning. You can look at this thing very simply through a piece of data, or you can look at this thing in a very complex way."

Borui has the following main indicators to judge whether an application is good or not. The first is the availability of access; the second is the transmission speed or overall time consumption; in addition, we will look at some technical indicators, such as response time consumption, connection time consumption, etc. Each technology represents a different system from the backend. For example, the connection time consumption may be related to the network and server resources, and the response time consumption is related to the code quality and the server. By locating these "block" problems, we can effectively diagnose the location of the problem.

The reason why Meng Xidong and Bo Rui focus on active APM is closely related to their clear market positioning. In the early stage, Bo Rui positioned the entire customer audience as top customers. These customers are very sensitive to their business data and systems. Even when we help customers locate faults and optimize applications, customers are unwilling to open some application-derived data only to us. Without the aggregation of internal and external data, the efficiency of locating problems is reduced, so customers are less likely to accept passive APM solutions.

In addition, Borui is very professional in big data technology. Active APM is to diagnose problems through data, and the accuracy of data is very high. Big data technology can perform good data cleaning and calculate more valuable information. For example, Borui has a product that can compile China's entire network monitoring data into a network map, which can know the congestion situation of China's entire network in real time. It is impossible to achieve this with the original database. Without big data technology, it is very difficult to support this platform and it is impossible to provide customers with more valuable data. What is very valuable is that Borui is more open. Through Borui's active platform, they can have more data in other dimensions, such as which city or province has the best 3G Internet access quality for netizens. These data may be meaningful to some other industries. He opened this part of the data to create convenience for others. If more public monitoring data can be opened between peers or upstream and downstream in the industrial chain, the industrial value of our APM will be more considerable.

Future development trend of APM market

With the popularity of mobile Internet, entrepreneurial teams have sprung up like mushrooms after rain, and I believe that more entrepreneurial teams will join the field of APM. In addition, the development of PaaS has also brought greater development space to the APM market. Meng Xidong has his own unique insights on the future development trend of the APM market.

"I welcome more companies to do this. The more companies there are in this industry, the more it can prove the scale of the industry." In response to the emergence of new competitors, Meng Xidong expressed a welcoming attitude and showed confidence in Borei's competitive advantage in the APM field. He mentioned that the technical threshold of APM is relatively high, especially for active APM, which not only requires long-term practice to verify the service quality, but also requires strong corporate strength, because the most headache for active APM is to deploy a monitoring network nationwide, and dynamically operate the monitoring network and schedule tasks. This is a big threshold. This is also Borei's core competitive advantage in the APM field.

"The APM market is huge, and we still hope that more entrepreneurial teams will enter this market to jointly promote the development of the field."