Life of a Performance Specialist Symposium on Software Performance - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1

“Into the wild…” Life of a Performance Specialist

Symposium on Software Performance (SSP 2015) Munich, 5.-6.11.2015

Torsten Hellwig, Dipl.-Inf., Managing Partner @ QMETHODS Business & IT Consulting GmbH

2

You don‘t need to walk to Alaska…

3

Who am I – how did it start

• first programming in 1986
• Master in computer science from TU Dresden in 1998
• software engineer and architect, Java, PHP, JS, …
• in 2003 established testing / QA at an insurance company
• „moved to the other side“: leading Ops team – no system monitoring!
• 2010 first encounter with Applicaton Performance Management: Dynatrace
• Performance Consultant ever since…

4

What does an application performance guy do ?

• Troubleshoot application performance, yay !
• Educating and evangelising APM
• Understand customers maturity, organisational structure, processes
• map requirements and expectations to a solution
• help with tooling decisions: demonstrate tools, prove value
• set up and establish tooling – develop customers maturity

5

A little theory on APM

• it‘s a lifecycle thing !
• get grip and control over your environment
• performance requirements (NFRs to FRs)
• develop performance aware or –driven
• white-box testing
• holistic monitoring
• automation !

6

What you need to look at…

• organisational
• classic siloed IT organization
• DevOps
• outsurcing
• skill levels
• maturity
• driving blind – end user experience, monitoring
• reactive, problem-driven
• aware and effective
• optimized process, continuous improvement
• technical environment
• tooling

7

Collaboration

8

Troubleshooting

• pro-actively
• new application to be rolled out – does it perform ?
• QA or users constantly complain
• Dev has no idea anymore
• Ops has no idea but ‚more hardware!‘
• Business needs a solution
• war room – the house is on fire
• outtages
• KPIs bad (conversion rate, revenue)
• project deadline was … yesterday

9

Example 1: Troubleshooting

• larger customer wants to introduce a new HR software
• big bang rollout planned and communicated to >1000 employees
• large peak in load expected on go-live
• vendor and hosting provider did some improvised load tests with jMeter
• more hosted hardware would drive up costs, still no guarantee

10

Approach

• first: wire up APM to the test environment which is used by manual testers – do

End-to-End analysis over a whole day

• understand the app and user behaviour
• see the infrastructure
• check functional health
• second: repeat a properly defined load test under APM diagnosis
• proper definition: user behaviour patterns from above + capabilities of the load driver
• estimated virtual users: 1 VU = 25 real users
• system was able to sustain 300 real users…

11

Read the signs…

12

Example 2: business-driven, strategic-thinking

„We have no problems, we just want to stay ahead of the rest…“

• strong growth – want to limit growing costs
• high peak to normal traffic ratio – elastic cloud
• business stakeholders want insight
• better collaboration wanted – software vendor and hosting provider are external
• application performance management is the key

„looks like a walk in the park…“

13

What‘s the deal then ?

• understand their real situation
• full outsourcing ? uhm…
• a Bank, with demanding stakeholders
• really high traffic
• propose a solution and get it up and running
• integration+automation
• hotline
• incident management
• big data analytics
• collaboration process with both external parties
• skill transfer

14

Example 3: Out there in the wild…

The Mainframe

15

Active APM user…

• it‘s about coverage
• you can‘t start everything at the same time
• complexity of project
• cost
• limited resources
• customer with classic IT organization does APM in Dev, Test and Ops
• started in the online business branch
• technology coverage left out the backend: Mainframe
• separate tooling – common architecture
• again – growth (mobile frontend)
• cost limiting: Mainframe pays per CPU usage !

16

The task…

• Assess requirements
• propose a solution – extend APM into the Mainframe
• win the Mainframers
• evaluate tooling

How ?

• get it up and running and FIND SOME PROOF
• the trick: correlation of distributed and mainframe on transaction level

QMETHODS - Business & IT Consulting GmbH Stargarder Straße 10 10437 Berlin Telefon : +49 (30) 22 19 86 51 Telefax : +49 (30) 22 19 86 53 E-Mail : info@qmethods.com Internet : http://www.qmethods.com

Thanks for your patience!

Questions ? Torsten Hellwig | Management Partner +49 (178) 838 0450 torsten.hellwig@qmethods.com