APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management

Chapter 8. Essential Processes

Small projects need much more help than great.

—Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

In the previous chapter, I covered a number of process activities that are part of a large-scale deployment. In this chapter, I take a step back and focus on the more critical processes that you need to enable a production deployment on a smaller scale. As you saw earlier, the scope of an APM initiative will vary widely, depending on monitoring and organizational maturity. A large-scale deployment is only possible with a mature organization. You need to fill the gap by focusing on the key processes that will protect the smaller initiatives from failure. However, a small initiative needs to keep the bigger picture in mind, even if some activities ...