James Simmonds

Continuing my "Business Agility" series (I promise to explain what I mean by this!) I wanted to talk about another area of software that is often over looked and lacking information...application performance monitoring. To start with why is performance monitoring important and what has it got to do with "business agility"? As with my previous post on debugging it is the lack of information that directly impacts the ability of the business to improve its software. The lack of performance information is a blind spot as to what is actually happening operationally with your software. Ignorance of a problem doesn’t always equal bliss! In my experience much business software is written without regard for performance. However this is not the sin - the sin in my eyes is that the ability to measure performance is often not thought about at all and if performance does become an issue then it is often too late to put in place a good, consistent monitoring framework. Performan