APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management

Chapter 4. Staffing and Responsibilities

Always two there are. A master . . . and an apprentice.

—Frank Oz (as Yoda)

Monitoring of the IT infrastructure has been a familiar capability ever since the 1960s, when that first programmer sought to see if the soda machine was empty without having to take that long walk down the hall. Any measurement results in a metric indicating some quantity. In this case, the number of a particular soda remaining. An agent makes the measurement and uses a communication protocol to transfer the metric (count of soda remaining) so that someone may evaluate and make a decision. Hence, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was born. Now 50 years later, the basic idea remains the same. In order to support business ...