Designing the Next Generation of Usability for Application Performance Management Solutions

ca Opscenter

Designing The Next Generation of Usability for Application Performance Management Solutions

Kevin Mackie

OCX18S #CAWorld

CA TechnologiesApplication Performance Management

2 © 2014 CA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Abstract

In this session, you will get an overview of the findings from the latest APM usability research. You will learn how the APM user personas have evolved and how the next generation of CA APM is being designed to address the needs for various user personas.

Kevin Mackie

CA Technologies

Vice President, Product Design

APM


Agenda

TRANSFORMING APM

DESIGNING FROM PERSONAS

Q&A

HOW KYLE IS DRIVING APM COMMAND CENTER

PETE TOURS THE FUTURE OF APM (DEMO)

WE NEED YOUR HELP

1

2

3

4

5

6


Transforming APM

BUILD TIME

16Hours

1

INSTALL TIME

240Minutes

35

DEV SITES

23Locations

4

LINES OF CODE

14Million

5

RELEASE TESTING

2000Days

400

RELEASE CYCLE

18Months

6

3X Feature Payload


A Better APM Model for the App Economy

APM transformation EasyE

ProactiveP

IntelligentI

CollaborativeC

“A problem well articulated is a problem half-solved”

Charles KetteringInventor


What can a toothbrush tell us about design?


User Research

Spoke to 80 users across 17 customers in 18 cities:

Support analysts

Developers

Performance engineers

APM administrators

Managers

Telecom

Financial Services

Technology

Utilities

Government

Entertainment

Transportation


What Did we Ask

What does a really bad day look like?

What’s the biggest challenge you face at work?

What do you like best about your job?

Tell me about the last major problem in your production environment.

When there’s a problem, who do you work with to resolve it?

If we gave you a magic wand to improve your production environment, what

would it look like after you waved your wand?

We encourage users to tell stories about their experience


Move to a more proactive stance.

Reactive“Bucket brigade”

Reactive improvement“Smoke alarm installers”

Continuous improvement“Smokey the Bear”

(Fire Prevention)

Reactive ProactiveApproach to monitoring

Human capital expenditure

(APM)

Low

High

LEARN MOREGet the whitepaper

http://ca.com/startattheend


Key ChallengesWhat were some of the main challenges our users face?

Complexity

The complex environment and set of APM tools take time for people to become proficient.

Knowledge

Knowledge is held by a few key users and is not easily accessible across the organization.

Data

Users are inundated with data instead of actionable information.

Sharing

Sharing information is an arduous process across a number of different tools.

Easy Proactive Intelligent Collaborative


Personas

Andrew Cheung

Application developer

Kyle Thomas

APM administrator

Pete Miller

Level 1 Support analyst

(12 hour shift)

Ryan Campbell

Production support

analyst

Eric Sullivan

Senior middleware

specialist

Trevor Boyd

Level 1 Support analyst

(12 hour shift)

Diana Reyes

Production support analyst

Marcus Hernandez

Performance test

engineer

Jeevan Meher

Production performance

engineer

DBA

Network admin

Infrastructure admin

Dev

DBA

Network admin


APM admin

Dev

DBA

Network admin


APM admin

Tools architect

Other Players

Other Players

Other Players

Reactive“Bucket brigade”

Reactive improvement“Smoke alarm

installers”

Continuous improvement

“Smokey the Bear”(Fire Prevention)

13 © 2014 CA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.”

The quicker you find the fire, the quicker you can put it out.”

Kyle ThomasAPM Administrator


Kyle Thomas, APM Admin

Kyle’s Needs Understand who is using the monitoring system and

what changes they’ve made.

Get people the playground to work in without disturbing other groups or the overall operation of the monitoring system.

Needs the process of standing up monitoring to be simpler so he can respond to more teams’ requests.

Kyle’s Pain Points Watching the performance of the monitoring system

to make sure instrumentation levels won’t crash it

Putting all the instrumentation in place because regular expression patterns are hard to learn

Manually configuring the monitoring servers consistently when the data is practically the same for each

About Kyle

Kyle is the sole APM administrator for the production environment. As the specialist in APM, he’s often called in to install monitoring after an application is deployed to production, or to assist in diagnosing production problems.

Enable others to take advantage of APM technology.

Stop answering the same questions over and over.

Automate more of the monitoring process.

Get developers to pay attention to monitoring before their applications reach production.

Offload simple monitoring configuration tasks to the app teams.

”

I don’t go to school for this stuff...I learned because someone told me. ”

Pete MillerLevel 1 Support Analyst

Pete Miller, Level-1 Support Analyst

Pete’s Needs Clear indication of meaning and action associated

with alerts: Where should I look? What should I do?

Clear understanding of what systems are affected when a component fails: Which users? What is the priority?

Understand the connections between applications, so he can alert teams when there’s an impacting issue

Pete’s Pain Points Monitoring so many systems and physical devices

means that it takes a long time to understand everything

No clear instructions on what to do when there’s a problem

Having to deal with too many different tools, each with their own navigation and mental model

It takes a lot of work to quickly understand the meaning of alerts

About Pete

Pete works in the Operations Center, where he monitors the alerts for a hundreds of different apps and systems. He works with a team of four other guys to manage the queue on 12-hour shifts. They juggle multiple tools to deal with all of the systems they support. Pete has a background in PC support.

• Keep the system humming

• Make sure he’s pulling his weight and contributing to the team

• Handle most problems on his own, but know when to ask for help

• Make sure he’s wrapped things up at the end of the day

• Feel like he knows what’s going in the room at all times


Additional ResearchResearch is an ongoing activity.

CA Community

As we conduct additional research over the coming months, engage with the CA Community to sign up and help us understand the challenges your users our facing to help us build the next generation of CA APM.


For More Information

To learn more about DevOps, please visit:

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For Informational Purposes Only

© 2014 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

This presentation provided at CA World 2014 is intended for information purposes only and does not form any type of warranty. Some of the specific slides with customer references relate to customer's specific use and experience of CA products and solutions so actual results may vary.

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