Evolution is all about change. The biggest one or the strongest one is not the longest surviving one on the earth. The one that adapts, that too adapts quickly will thrive, others will become extinct. This point holds good for internet and scale applications as well. In fact, it is more important for new age applications, as the life expectancy of these apps keep shrinking day by day. Newer ones come fast, older ones get forgotten quickly.

If you need to delight your users, first delight them on speed and performance; then come the rest. Most often people try to throw high config hardware to offset performance degradation. The fundamental reason to this, is, they do not want to change their way of writing software.

Today, we need to be agile in our releases, fixes and testing. If we do not do that, new changes/features do not reach end users at a faster rate; hence the product loses edge to compete with newer products. Release, as often as possible. But every build must be monitored so critically; failing which you will never know when a surge will happen and when your apps will fail.

The next biggest inertia is not to monitor every piece. People use some monitors, in some places for some time. All pieces must be monitored all the time. This is possible in software. The inherent fear of many hidden things getting exposed is the reason for it. You can't solve a problem you don't know. Unless you test for everything, you won't know what's causing the problem and won't be able to fix it.

The next big mind block is not to use the data provided by the monitoring and performance management tools. Install, see charts for a few days and forget. This mind block is due to the reason that internal SLAs are not properly enforced in most of the organizations. Pretty much you set SLAs for vendors, have the same for internal groups such as dev-ops, support etc.

Change is the only constant. The moment you make one step forward in the above 3 areas, it will automatically lead you to the next better step. We have personally seen a complete transformation in teams, when they monitor the online performance of their apps. All it takes is a day or two to see results and patterns.