APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management

Chapter 15. Triage with Baselines

Kick Off Meeting

Motivation

The most important piece of history is the baseline. At some point, either in production or pre-production, someone collected metrics on the application when it was performing normally, and generated a report of graphs and tables about the key metrics. For what the key metrics are, and how to find them, please look at Chapter 12. This baseline report is essentially a signature of the application. It is also what most folks are attempting to compare to when they have an incident but they just don't have ready access to historical information. A baseline eliminates the subjective memory and replaces it with a historical snapshot of performance characteristics.

Provided that monitoring is ...