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Managing Performance with
APM Acceptance Criteria
Michael Sydor
DOX08S #CAWorld
CA Technologies
Service Assurance
DevOps

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2 © 2014 CA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Abstract
Reliable processes for identifying appropriate metrics and
validating these metrics via collaboration with the various
stakeholders across the application lifecycle remain
unaddressed. APM visibility exposes these metrics and
directly supports their aggregation as transaction profiles
and performance baselines. This establishes a framework
for reliable acceptance criteria and also defines the roles
and responsibilities through which the stakeholders can
collaborate to both validate the monitoring configuration
as well as align with business objectives.
Full paper in CATX 2014:: Beyond Deployment Automation - Realizing Dev/Ops Metrics and Collaboration through APM Visibility
Michael
Sydor
CA Technologies
Sr. Engineering
Services Architect

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3 © 2014 CA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Agenda
THE CHALLENGE FOR DEVOPS INITIATIVE
NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS AND KPIS
ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA LIFECYCLE
CLOSING POINTS
1
2
3
4

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The Challenge for DevOps:
Simply deploying faster can make things worse!
Dev -> QA -> UAT -> Prod
Quarterly
Weekly
Daily
50
140 total
300+ total

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We Know What Happens From Agile Sprints
Issues encountered and resolved while new functionality is introduced.

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Where are Performance Problems Identified?
Increasing performance testing maturity
Performance test
established
UAT
established
Production
Pre-production
QA
Performance
Visibility introduced
FireFighting
practice

7.
NFRs and KPIs
Non-functional requirements and
key performance indicators
Putting teeth into a DevOps initiative

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Who Cares About NFRs?
1 - WebSphere Commerce V5.4 Handbook: Architecture and Integration Guide
2 - Mastering the Requirements Process - Getting Requirements Right
REQUIREMENTS
WEBSPHERE1
REQUIREMENTS
MASTERING REQUIREMENTS2
APM VISIBILITY
General business understanding
and objectives
Cultural, look-and-feel, usability and
humanity, legal
Applications used in the solution
Operational, environmental,
maintainability, support
Security Security 
Performance Performance 
Capacity planning 
Scalability 
Availability 
Testing 
Customer (end-user) metrics 

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Baselines
Configuration – Do we have a valid
monitoring configuration?
Application – Do we have visibility
into the key transactions?
Performance – Can we identify KPIs
for availability, performance and
capacity?
KPIs
Suspect – significant because of
frequency of execution
Validated – known to correlate
with performance issues
Some Terms

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Lifecycle Visibility AchievedPotentialmetricsKPIs
Unit test Functional test Stress test UAT Production Triage
10,000
5,000
3,000
1,500 2,500 2,500
20
30 50
10 30 35
60
40
55 45
15
Potential
metricsKPIs
Unit test
Functional
test Stress test UAT Production Triage
5,500 4,500
40
100
35
75
Suspect KPI
Validated KPI
Production-only
visibility

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KPI Management Maturity
Diagnosticvalue
KPI maturity
(Platform) (Application) (Transaction)
SGCM
Stalls,
GC settings,
Concurrency,
Memory management trends
APC
Availability,
Performance,
Capacity
EKB
Errors,
Key resource performance,
Business transaction survey

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KPI Evolution
PLATFORM
Coarse information
..but not really APM
Application, transactions, resources
The APM Advantage
GOOD BETTER (ADDITIONAL) BEST (ADDITIONAL)
Stalls Availability – connected status Errors
GC settings Availability – metric count Key resource performance
Concurrency Suspect performance Business transaction survey
Memory management (graph) Suspect capacity

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How to Find KPIs

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Capacity KPIs – “Tree Rings”

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Performance KPI – Trap

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Performance KPI – Volume Adjusted

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Performance KPIs – Summary
High volume
+
significant
response time

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Validation of KPIs
90 minutes before 30 minutes after
Incident confirmed
2 hour window
uncorrelated
degraded
correlated

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Baseline – Reporting

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Acceptance Criteria Lifecycle

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Baselines
None
Smoke test
Configuration
Application
(transactions)
Performance
Often leads to a
QA practice – Functional
Ineffective
No test Smoke test Use case test Performance/Stress test Load-to-failure
Capacity
forecast
Often leads to a
performance practice

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Baselines – Summary
Foundation for any significant benefit from APM
 You need to establish ‘normal’ before you can consistently triage.
 Or you need very capable staff and a LOT of experience.
 You need to report on what is significant, not simply provide hundreds of
metrics and “... Just go figure it out!”
Absence of baselines will reinforce a “why bother with QA” and “test-in-
production” mentality.
Danger signs
 Focus on availability but no performance or capacity interest.
 Lots of metrics, metric groupings and dashboards but no report templates.
 You still can’t triage production incidents effectively.

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Acceptance Criteria – KPIs
None
Package
assembly
Stalls Errors Often leads to a
QA practice – Functional
Ineffective
No test Smoke test Use case test Performance/Stress test Load-to-failure
Often leads to a
performance practice
Memory
profileConcurrency Response
time

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Acceptance Criteria – Summary
Foundation for any pre-production review
You will need to ‘phase-in’ acceptance criteria.
App server configuration tuning
Performance advisory
“We saw __X__. It is a potential concern and we will confirm in production.”
Performance exception
“We saw __Y__. It is a problem and you need signoff to continue to production.”
Performance requirement
“We sax __Z__. You cannot continue to production.”
Danger signs
Lots of criteria but no process for remediation prior to production or confirmation in
production.

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Configuration
baseline
Performance
baseline
Application
baseline
NFRs
FRs
Use cases
Compatible APM
configurations
Suspect KPIs
Security
Scalability
Capacity plan
Stress test
Certification
Hierarchal dashboards
Baseline report
Management
module
Pre-production Checklist
Overhead absent
Excess metrics absent
Suspect KPIs identified
Availability alert defined
Acceptance criteria evaluated (performance)
Saturation alert defined (scalability)
Capacity alert defined
Failover capability assessed
Security certification
Overview
Architecture/operations
Triage view
Resource view
Visibility assessed (transaction trace
completeness)
Business transaction definition

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Pre-production Checklist
Overhead validated
Excess metrics absent validated
Suspect KPIs validated
Availability alert validated
Acceptance criteria validated
Saturation alert validated
Capacity alert validated
Failover capability validated
Security certification
Overview validated
Architecture/operations validated
Triage view validated
Resource view validated
Visibility validated (transaction trace
completeness)
Business transaction definition validated
Pre-production review
Operational period
Incident
Triage and root-cause
Post-production review
Validation
Application audit

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Closing Points

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Resources
Community site
 Cookbook: APM HealthCheck
 Understanding which metrics matter (KPI discussion)
 Cookbook: Application audit
 More details on the baseline techniques and process
 Blog entries
 Redefine triage by learning the golden nuggets of APM...
 What are KPIs and how can I get some quick?!
 Big Data – What does it mean for APM????
 Why does ABA find anomalies when there is nothing wrong in production?
APM best practices – Realizing Application Performance Management
 available on Amazon.com and Apress.com
 Baselines, test plans, app audits, triage, firefighting
 Organizational models, service catalogs

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29 © 2014 CA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Summary
A Few Words to Review
Key topics
You cannot expect to deploy
quicker to get better app
quality.
APM gives you visibility into
NFRs and KPIs.
Acceptance criteria is how you
will harness DevOps
deployment acceleration.
Findings
APM documents NFRs
and KPIs.
Acceptance criteria pre-
production allows for true
proactive management of the
app lifecycle.
Experiences
Agile techniques show what
will happen without viable
acceptance criteria.
KPIs are easy to find and
manage via baselines.
Baselines make reporting and
triage more effective.

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For More Information
To learn more about DevOps, please visit:
http://bit.ly/1wbjjqX
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from following “More Info Graphics” slide here;
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DevOps

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