Evangelizing Your Application Performance Management Solution

By Author: Joseph Mathew
Total Articles: 11
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This week we’ll take a look at one of my favorite aspects of deploying performance monitoring software properly … showing off (just a little bit) and helping others find their inner rockstar!

How do I help others find their inner rockstar and why would I want to do that?

When it comes right down to it you need to show results. If you are the only person using a tool successfully the odds are stacked against you when it comes time to renew your subscription or maintenance for that tool. So spread the APM love and become more successful through the success of others. Here’s how…

Have you ever heard the saying “It takes a whole village to raise a child”? Well think of your APM tool as the child, your group as your family, and your entire organization as the village. The more people properly using your APM tool the more problems you will solve, the faster your star will rise, and the better your ROI will be.

Your Family

The most obvious place to improve your ...
... APM adoption level is within your own group. There should be multiple people who know how to manage, use, and evangelize your APM tool. If you get run over by a bus tomorrow who will take over where you left off? It doesn’t have to be one person, make sure a few people in your group are involved and divide up the responsibilities.

Your Village

Next you need to use your family to help with adoption across your organization. Make a list of the groups and applications that you think would benefit from your APM tool. Find out what applications have the most problems (the operations center is a great place to get this information). Head out with your experts and meet with the application owners and convince them to try your solution. Once you have their approval make sure you do what is needed to make their team successful. If you help just a few of these application teams overcome their problems you will have tremendous allies when the time comes to justify what you do and the money you spend.

Developers

APM tools can do wonderful things for developers, who typically have to rely on .NET profiler in pre-production to find performance issues. Even for traditional development organizations, getting visibility into production can be a huge boon for the developer. This benefit is even greater for developers with an agile release cycle, where change is constant.

Getting support across your organization for your new software, whether it’s a full-fledged APM solution or just a JVM download, is critical to the success of the project. Be sure to evangelize success and promote education among various teams in order to drive the maximum value from your new tool.