Is Plumbr for developers or operations?

When Rabbit said “Honey or condensed milk with your bread?” Pooh was so excited that he said, “Both,” and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, “But don’t bother about the bread, please.”

For whom is your solution designed to? Not having a clear answer to the question, or worse, answering in a classy Winnie-the-Pooh style to “everyone” is usually a clear sign that the product owner really does not understand the market.

I am going to take a stand here and claim that our performance monitoring solution can and will benefit both engineering and operational roles. In regards of what Plumbr has to offer, operations and engineering are just two sides of the same coin, both interested in increasing the availability and performance of the services. Plumbr is able to help out both teams.

Operational teams tend to be all out for keeping an eye on availability and performance of the services. For such teams, Plumbr can and will:

• Trace those impossible-to-reproduce performance issues down to a root cause. No more lengthy trial-and-error processes, weekends in war rooms or rolling back releases.
• Quantify the impact of such incidents.  You are no longer flying blind during triaging of such incidents.
• Group isolated performance incidents by actual root causes, making sure the impact of recurring issues will not be ignored.

As a result operational teams will receive a framework for triaging and tracing down the root cause – with Plumbr the operations team now understands exactly what is broken, which incidents are connected and where to start the fixing process.

Developers come into the play when a SLA violation has been confirmed and the fix needs engineering team involvement. For such teams, Plumbr will:

• Zoom right into the offending code causing issues in production. Instead of the lengthy reproduction or evidence gathering process, you are pinpointed to the single line in source code guilty of triggering the issue.
• Increase quality of the releases. With Plumbr monitoring your test environment you are looking for green light from Plumbr. This indicates that dangerous performance bugs are not shipping to the production and are caught by load tests instead.

As a result engineers can focus on developing new and meaningful stuff that creates value, instead of spending weeks and weeks on troubleshooting performance issues.