The Application Performance Management Lifecycle

Application Performance Management has a full lifecycle.   There are 5 phases as seen in the following image.  The phases include Performance testing, Performance tuning, Capacity Planning, Application Monitoring changes, and Application Management.

Performance engineering should begin in the technical specifications phase of a change.   For each component of a system, a performance budget can be defined.   Unit testing should not only include functional testing, but also testing of the objects utilization of its capacity budget.   System testing can then include identification of bottlenecks at the system level and performance tuning activities.   At T3 Dynamics, we believe that this and duration testing (looking for memory leaks) is where performance testing provides the greatest value.   To answer many of the questions that the business has, including "What will be the performance in production?", and "Will the production infrastructure scale to the peak capacity requirements of our customers?", one needs to leverage the performance testing data to do capacity modeling by building a discrete simulation model.   This allows IT to answer the "What if" questions both accurately and to address the complexity of most production environments where the change will be promoted.  

Application management also begins in the technical specifications phase of the SDLC.   It is here that the measures are defined that will be instrumented within the application management toolset.   The changes to the application management framework are done in parallel with the application development with a goal of getting to system testing at least at the same time.   These can then be tested as part of the performance testing activities.   In the testing phase, the group that will be managing the application in production is trained on the new measures and the runbook changes.   The learnings from the Application Management phase are inputs to the next application change starting the cycle again.   At T3 Dyanamics, we have a methodology to help you meet your customer expectations for performance and availability while helping you deliver the results with accuracy and at the lowest cost possible.