Most articles on the topic of NoSQL are around the theme of RDBMS vs. NoSQL. DBA’s are defending RDBMS by stating that NoSQL solutions are all dumb immature data stores without any standards. Many NoSQL proponents react with the argument that RDMBS does not scale and that today everybody needs to deal with huge amounts [...]

We often see request error rates as an indicator for SLA compliance. Reality however shows that this draws a wrong picture. Let’s start with an example. We had a meeting with a customer and were talking about their SLA and what it is based on. Like in many other cases the request error rate was [...]

I was looking at Cassandra, one of the major NoSQL solutions, and I was immediately impressed with its write speed even on my notebook. But I also noticed that it was very volatile in its response time, so I took a deeper look at it. First Cassandra Write Test I did the first write tests [...]

Often performance management is still confused with performance troubleshooting. Others think that performance management in production is simply about system and JVM level monitoring and that they are already doing APM. The first perception assumes that APM is about speeding up some arbitrary method performance and the second assumes that performance management is just about [...]

Testing mobile web sites on the actual device is still a challenge. While tools like dynaTrace Ajax Edition make it very easy to get detailed performance data from desktop browsers, we do not have the same luxury for mobile. I was wondering whether desktop tooling can be used for analyzing and optimizing mobile sites. My idea was [...]

The ability to scale your environment on demand is one of the key advantages of a public cloud like Amazon EC2. Amazon provides a lot of functionality like the AutoScaling groups to make this easy. The one downside in my mind is that basing auto scaling on system metrics is a little naive and from [...]

// Mozilla is fast with releasing new versions of Firefox and following fast is the dynaTrace team. As many of our users have asked about Firefox 5 support we are happy to announce that we have support with dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.2 Beta. Release support for Firefox 5 will follow shortly for both our dynaTrace [...]

Response times are in many – if not in most – cases the basis for performance analysis. When they are within expected boundaries everything is ok. When they get to high we start optimizing our applications. So response times play a central role in performance monitoring and analysis. In virtualized and cloud environments they are [...]

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 [...]