"The goal of APM best practices is to improve the performance outcome, and for the best outcome these best practices cannot stand alone. Each must be embedded into a continuous improvement process that ensures that application performance meets your business needs..."
They describe how "APM Benchmarking" will help an organization understand their capabilities and how they compare with other practitioners. This is what I call the 'Skills Assessment' (Chapter 3), and with other exercises for assessing enterpise visibility, lets you understand overall maturity of your APM practice. I created more of a idealized model, based on an amalgam of actual customer achievements. But I never had the opportunity to count how many of each customers achieved a particular level of APM maturity.
What is interesting that among those companies that participated, here is where they 'self-assessed':
The bulk of the population rated themselves on the low side and this is consistent with what I have been seeing over the last few years. Only 1 participant gave themselves a full rating, out of 329 total participants. Folks really need best practices to help them progress in using APM to address performance problems and show value for the new processes that will be established.
There is also a nice chart that summarizes the types of metrics that the participants are interested in.
Another interesting graph is the impediments to realizing an APM practice. THe authors call these "inhibitors" and it is a useful graph.
