Exclusive interview with OneAPM COO Cheng Xianfeng: Why do we need APM?

Nowadays, the word "smart" is mentioned frequently, and it seems that everything is being made smart. But is it really so? Is your maintenance smart? Does your website still rely on user complaints to find problems?

From September 17 to 19 this year, at the China Architect Conference held at the Beijing Wuzhou Crown International Hotel, there was an endless stream of people stopping to watch or ask questions at the OneAPM booth. With the continuous development of mobile terminals and the increasing concurrency, APM is becoming an indispensable link in the Internet industry chain.

Why do we need APM?

He Xiaoyang, the founder of OneAPM, also said in his speech that there are many small development teams now, and they are facing two difficulties. First, it is not easy for these small teams to develop apps that become popular. Second, even if they become popular overnight through WeChat or media, and many people start to use them, the backend service cannot keep up with the sudden increase in concurrency. Users experience problems such as flash disconnection, exit, and slowness. Then you are left with one star on the app store. The app that originally had the potential to rise has no business prospects due to performance and poor user experience. It sounds cruel, but it is a very common fact.

Cheng Xianfeng, COO of OneAPM, said frankly: We hope to provide a service that will make application performance no longer a problem. For developers, just provide good services to customers and think about your business innovation, and you don't need to worry about performance issues. We provide this application performance management Totel Solution to help all our customers solve these problems in a unified way. This is the value of our OneAPM SaaS platform.

Foreign giants are not adapting to the local environment

APM is the hottest field in the US. Among the companies that went public in the US this year, there was usually only one IPO in one field, such as Zendesk and BOX. However, this year, two APM companies emerged, and they maintained a market value of about 3 billion US dollars. Although many foreign giants are engaged in APM, their development in China has encountered difficulties.

Cheng Xianfeng believes that first of all, the development methods in China are very different from those abroad, and the excellent Internet companies in China are also local companies. Historically, foreign giants have not made changes for domestic enterprises, and they will not make changes for domestic enterprises now or in the future. From another perspective, OneAPM has served many industry-level customers before the SaaS model, including projects in finance, telecommunications, government, energy, etc. A lot of rich experience has been accumulated in the large-scale projects done over the years, and these local experiences are more likely to support local small and medium-sized enterprises.

Advantages of One APM

Performance tuning is a very valuable experience, and it is not something a programmer can gain simply by reading a lot of books. Exactly the same reason, except for some giants, small and medium-sized enterprises have not yet reached this stage, and do not have or have enough time and money to accumulate.

Cheng Xianfeng said: We have served many industry-level clients before, including projects in finance, telecommunications, government, energy, etc. We have accumulated a lot of rich experience in the large projects we have done over the years. The value of OneAPM is to integrate the most valuable experience of the entire industry that the giants have explored for many years into the product, so that small and medium-sized enterprises can easily enjoy what the big companies have accumulated over the years.

What does this mean? For example, Apple's interactive model is very good, but their technology accumulation can be traced back to the 1980s. However, now we can enjoy Apple's decades of technology accumulation for just a few thousand dollars. This is the value of OneAPM.

Code level

Cheng Xianfeng admitted that in actual operation and maintenance, most operation and maintenance personnel spend 90% of their time locating where the problem occurs. However, OneAPM targets the web side of traditional Internet companies, goes deeper into the background, and provides true code-level diagnosis. OneAPM can diagnose which code has a problem by deploying a probe. For example, the thermometer used to detect problems in my background. Ours is equivalent to a CT machine, which can accurately diagnose which part is faulty. This can save 90% of the average repair time, which is a qualitative change for a 7X24 Internet company.

Although OneAPM can perform code-level diagnosis, in response to the reporter's questions about enterprise sensitive data and data privacy, Cheng Xianfeng said: Although OneAPM can perform code-level diagnosis, it will automatically filter out users' sensitive data and only analyze the logical relationship of the code, which means we cannot obtain users' privacy-sensitive data.

Mobile

The number of mobile devices installed is huge. With so many apps out there, what is the real user experience like? Where are they stuck? There is a lack of timely feedback.

What do software developers need? In fact, what developers really need is user experience and performance data, but most of the data currently provided is business data, including activation, transaction, and penetration rate. However, this data is not tied to performance.

Cheng Xianfeng said: "Giant companies like Apple have also launched new development toolkits to allow developers to obtain user data, gain user experience, and discover their own problems. Everyone has the same view on this issue."

He believes that the terminal can be divided into several links, including registration, ordering and payment. However, few people can answer the question of which link performance degradation leads to user loss. He hopes to use the OneAPM application to integrate with the backend web terminal to provide users with a better solution.

Web

OneAPM's advantage lies in the traditional web end. In the interview, Cheng Xianfeng also mentioned that OneAPM has served many industry-level customers and has conducted in-depth code-level diagnosis. This is exactly the advantage of OneAPM that is different from other similar products on the market.

Cheng Xianfeng said: OneAPM is a revolution for Internet performance tuning. In the past, each company only had one or two debugging engineers, and debugging engineers needed a lot of experience. In the cloud era, our sending and receiving have changed. We can use the cloud for development and deployment. Now with OneAPM for debugging, we can find the problem by clicking on the web interface. What was previously thought to be impossible is now possible.

Roujiamo is as cheap as

As the mobile Internet is booming, Cheng Xianfeng said that OneAPM will continue to be committed to providing the best application performance management services to developers and small and medium-sized enterprises, and make the performance management services that used to cost millions of dollars available to developers at the price of a roujiamo. In the future, we hope that we will also make more functional improvements to the product, such as preventing the developed APP from crashing and improving the user experience several times. We expect that Chinese Internet users will enjoy high-speed and high-quality application services everywhere, and these applications will always receive almost stringent optimization from OneAPM.

User Voice

Zhaopin.com

OneAPM provides a very sound data analysis mechanism, including: log analysis, crash analysis, code operation analysis, etc. A large and comprehensive data analysis mechanism helps us improve website performance.

Haitao Tourism

OneAPM has two functions that we like the most: crash analysis and critical transaction function. Crash analysis can understand the cause of the error in time when it occurs; the critical transaction function defines the page request linked to revenue as a critical transaction; with the help of response time, throughput, page request snapshots, SQL statement analysis, etc., the performance of critical transactions can be improved to prepare for a rainy day.

Guevara APP

OneAPM can monitor the entire process of each user's ticket booking, which is something that the performance monitoring tools used before could not do. OneAPM uses a Gantt chart to display the performance of the front-end, network, and back-end servers at once, letting you know intuitively where the problem is.

V2EX

When OneAPM first came out, I was still waiting and watching. After trying it on the V2EX website, I found that OneAPM also supports non-traditional languages ​​such as Python very well. I think this project is still very promising.

China Plastics Online

When I first used OneAPM, I chose it because it was free; at the time, my company also had similar needs. The performance monitoring tools I used to use were either too large and complex, or poorly adaptable, and their functions were very limited. OneAPM supports a wide range of languages ​​and frameworks, and its functions can monitor everything from the front-end to the back-end server, to the code, JVM, and SQL.

Building Block Box

At that time, I helped OneAPM do product usability testing and compared the functions of New Relic and OneAPM. I remember that when our development team used this kind of product for the first time, we all felt that it was very advanced: it turned out that performance monitoring tools have developed to a whole new level. Moreover, OneAPM's functional perfection and ease of use are not inferior to New Relic, the leader of foreign APM.

365 Lottery

When placing lottery orders, the availability and concurrency requirements are very high. OneAPM is different from other performance monitoring tools. It can truly monitor whether it is a page request error or a SQL statement performance problem. OneAPM helped us improve SQL statement performance by 37.20%; for HTTP errors, OneAPM can also provide relevant data to help us understand the errors.