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 [...]

Lucy Monahan is a Principal Performance QA Engineer at Novell, and helps to manage their distributed Agile process. One of the most important features of an application is to provide adequate security and protect secrets held within. Business Transactions used with Continuous Integration, Unit-, Feature- and Negative Testing specialized for security can detect known security [...]

// 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 [...]

It has been 5 years ago that Amazon launched its EC2 Cloud. Since then it has been growing and learning constantly. Those in the know have waited and dreaded the coming 21st of April 2011.  Yesterday at 1AM PDT the Amazon Elastic Cloud gained self-awareness. It immediately tried to take over the US-EAST region. According [...]

Every change in your code can potentially introduce a performance regression and can impact the application’s ability to scale. Regression analysis addresses this problem by tracking performance aspects of different components throughout the development process and under different load patterns. Black vs. White Box Analysis There are different flavors of regression analysis. We can either [...]

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. [...]

We have some power users out there that do great things with dynaTrace. One of them is Eugene who really got into dynaTrace Dashboards and custom Monitoring Plugins. He shared some of his dashboards with me to show to others. Interested in more? Read the full article What others do with dynaTrace Dashboards on the [...]

Agile Development Practices have widely been adopted in R&D Organizations. A core component is Continuous Integration where code changes are continuously integrated and tested to achieve the goal of having “potential shippable code” at the end of every Sprint/Iteration. In order to verify code changes agile team members write Unit or Functional Tests that get [...]

I recently got engaged with a client who ran an increasing load test against their load-balanced application. I got engaged because they had a phenomenon they couldn’t explain – here is an excerpt of the email: We have a jBoss application with mySQL that runs stable in a load testing environment with let’s say 20 [...]