It’s Late 2016, What’s the New Rule for Performance Test Environments?

This question was passed around internally last week: “Does anyone on this distribution list have a list of good reasons why a test environment should approximate that of production to provide accurate test results in lieu of using a cheaper, smaller test environment and math to estimate production-like results?” In my former career, we had… Continue reading It’s Late 2016, What’s the New Rule for Performance Test Environments?

Performance Assessment – Collaboration

Learn to Collaborate Communication breakdown is not unique to IT. Somehow, most IT organizations create towers. Maybe this happens to reduce the number of status meeting or to allow for a tree-shaped management chain. When leadership creates these separate teams, the intention is not to prevent the individual contributors from collaborating and working efficiently, but… Continue reading Performance Assessment – Collaboration

Intervention Coming for “I Hate Agile” Crowd

For all of the conferences held in agile’s honor, and the praise it gets from coaches, evangelists, and companies like Skytap, nobody calls it a silver bullet. But there’s one thing we all agree on—agile is very difficult. Whether looking at the culture change required, embracing the continuous integration, delivery and deployment of code, or… Continue reading Intervention Coming for “I Hate Agile” Crowd

Autotrader uses AppDynamics to Solve Performance Issues in Production

There is a common theme among the stories told by our new enterprise customers freshly adopting our AppDynamics platform. As their application grows in scale to meet their customer demands, their time to diagnose performance issues were painfully increasing, too. Operations and development teams slowly seemed to come to accept an untrue reality that solving… Continue reading Autotrader uses AppDynamics to Solve Performance Issues in Production

Ultrafast Server Side Performance Optimization

When your solution is too slow to meet your business objectives you need to optimize it. This post is primarily based on a recent optimization project we did using AppDynamics to improve their solution. I will note that there were a few browser side optimizations that we did as well, but they were found quickly… Continue reading Ultrafast Server Side Performance Optimization

Documenting Complex Enterprise Apps

Many of the enterprise systems we encounter are very complex. Unfortunately, the IT teams that develop and support these solutions will oftentimes have inaccurate documentation to show all of the elements. The design of the software is handled by one organization whereas the actual implementation onto the underlying components end up within other teams such… Continue reading Documenting Complex Enterprise Apps

AppDynamics – How to Create and Monitor a Local .Net Application

Summary AppDynamics provides a 15-day free trial so you can test out its features on a self-host basis. This article is going to give you the steps needed to download the AppDynamics Agent and the AppDynamics Controller and begin monitoring an application on the Windows platform immediately. If you don’t already have an application to monitor, we will create a… Continue reading AppDynamics – How to Create and Monitor a Local .Net Application

Winning the Performance Race

From experience running benchmarks, I can tell you that in order to win them, you must have the full run of the servers, settings and the code. However, this is not the typical case in any large enterprise solution operating in the ‘real’ world. How can you achieve inclusive buy in on performance from your… Continue reading Winning the Performance Race

Understanding Performance of PayPal as a Service (PPAAS)

By Steve Sturtevant, Sales Engineer at AppDynamics In a previous post – Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance – I discussed some of the challenges faced in managing a successful performance engineering practices in an Agile development model.  Let’s continue this with a real world example, highlighting how AppDynamics simplifies the collection and comparison… Continue reading Understanding Performance of PayPal as a Service (PPAAS)

Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance

Just in case you haven’t heard, Waterfall is out and Agile is in.  For organizations that thrive on innovation, successful agile development and continuous deployment processes are paramount to reducing go to market time, fast tracking product enhancements and quickly resolving defects. Executed successfully, with the right team in place, Agile practices should result in… Continue reading Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance