APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management

Chapter 6. The Pilot Evaluation

Try it before you buy it.

The penultimate assessment of the utility of a monitoring initiative is to try out the tools in your own environment. I believe that everyone appreciates this simple concept. My concern is that it is very easy to define a pilot evaluation that completely fails to address the potential for the organization to correctly adopt the technology being considered. When this potential is zero, it can be a tremendous barrier to success in both applying the technology and in helping the organization mature its monitoring capabilities.

What compromises the usefulness of a pilot evaluation is that they are more often focused on features than the actual utility of the technology. As introduced in Chapter ...