At Velocity we announced dynaTrace Ajax Edition 2.0 beta 1 (watch the Lightning demo). Besides other great features (see the complete walkthrough video) we have added support for automatically uploading measurement results to ShowSlow.com. We have worked over the last couple of weeks to automate this process and now continuously upload performance metrics to ShowSlow. [...]
Application Performance, Scalability and Architecture
Measurement is the most central concept in any performance-related activity. If you are not measuring you are blind. As important as measuring per se is collecting the right measurements. Which metrics are the right ones depends on what you want to do. However there are some general principles which – when followed – can make [...]
In this post I discuss the seven most important steps to improve your application performance practices. These simple-to-follow practices will help you to improve the way you deal with application performance. Besides eventually improving the performance of your applications it will help you to avoid playing the classical blame game which normally happens when something [...]
When something goes wrong who’s to blame? In this post I take a closer look at who is responsible when applications have performance problems. Interestingly very often the question as to who is responsible is at least as important as how to solve the problem. In order to not have to search for the responsible [...]
We all know that slow performance – and service disruption even more – affects our business services and eventually our revenue. At the same time we say that major parts of companies are not willing to invest in performance. In this post I will discuss why we find ourselves in this paradox and how to [...]
Amazon EC2 offers the CloudWatch service to monitor cloud instances as well as load balancers. While this service comes at some cost (0,015$/hour/instance) it offers useful infrastructure metrics about the performance of your EC2 infrastructure. While there are commercial and free tools out there which provide this service, you might not want to invest in [...]
Lately I was checking out ShowSlow. The site is really great. It combines YSlow and PageSpeed metrics and visualizes them in a really nice way. When I clicked on the URLs Measured Tab I had to wait quite some time until the page finished downloading. While this page is really displaying a lot of information, [...]
In an earlier post I already discussed several approaches towards end-user experience (or performance) monitoring including their pros and cons. In this post I will present a simple real-world sample which shows the limits of performance traceability in AJAX applications. As I don’t like Hello World samples, I thought I’d rather build something a bit [...]
This time I take an a bit unconventional approach towards defining performance management. The idea for this post came through a number of customer engagements, where the same question came up over and over again: “How do we start with Application Performance Management and what should we do?” Over time I developed a simple model [...]
I had an interesting conversation with our Test Automation team lead Stefan – who Andi interviewed for our “Eating our own Dog Food ” article – on his experiences with the willingness of developers to write performance tests. I asked a provocative question: do developers really want to write them in the first place? First [...]
