This post is contributed by Asad Ali – Enablement Services Consultant at dynaTrace. Based on his experience with numerous customers he describes how to optimize the data access layer of applications by “violating” a paradigm that is often referred to as a golden rule for designing applications. Before the advent of the 3-tier architecture, client [...]

Performance is one of the major concerns in the cloud. But the question should not really be whether or not the cloud performs, but whether the Application in question can and does perform in the cloud. The main problem here is that application performance is either not managed at all or managed incorrectly and therefore [...]

// Next Wednesday, May 25th at Noon ET / 9AM PT I am happy to host another Best Practice Webinar with one of our customers. Dan Gerard, Divisional Vice President of Technical and Web Services at The Bon Ton Stores and I will talk about the challenges of optimizing performance in their WebSphere Commerce production [...]

Just in time for the upcoming Webinar with The BonTon Stores, were we talk about the challenges in operating complex WebSphere environments, we had another set of prospects running their applications on WebSphere. Francis Cordon, a colleague of mine, shares some of the screenshots resulting from these engagements. In this blog I want to highlight [...]

In the last week my task was to create stable functional tests for a new eCommerce application. We picked several use cases, e.g.: clicking through the different links, logging in, searching for products and actually buying a product. We needed functional tests that run on both Internet Explorer and Firefox. With these tests we want [...]

// Last time I explained logical and organizational prerequisites to a successful production level application performance monitoring. I originally wanted to look at the concrete metrics we need on every tier, but was asked how you can correlate data in a distributed environment, so this will be the first thing that we look into. So [...]

// When we get engaged with prospects that are interested in our performance management solution we walk them through a Proof of Concept. We let them install dynaTrace on their own prior to the actual POC. During the POC we ask them to exercise typical use cases on their application that show performance problems. We [...]

Memory and Garbage Collection problems are still the most prominent issues in any java application. One of the reasons is that the very nature of Garbage Collection is often misunderstood. This prompted me to write a summary of some of the most frequent and also most obscure memory related issues that I have encountered in [...]

Setting up Application Performance Monitoring is a big task, but like everything else it can be broken down into simple steps. You have to know what you want to achieve and subsequently where to start. So let’s start at the beginning and take a top-down approach Know what you want The first thing to do [...]

Production Monitoring is about ensuring the stability and health of our system, that also includes the application. A lot of times we encounter production systems that concentrate on System Monitoring, under the assumption that a stable system leads to stable and healthy applications. So let’s see what System Monitoring can tell us about our Application. [...]