Stephen Pierzchala

Complexity is the new reality of web and mobile applications with almost no new release going out without the addition of services and applications spread across many different companies. But the reality of this new interrelationship is still the same: If a third-party Internet outage or issue occurs, your brand is the one that is affected. With up to 1,500 distinct third-party services available to choose from around the world, it is sometimes difficult to even identify what a service does when it appears in your applications. This forces your team to not only be fully aware of the components you control, but also to be able to follow the trail of services that extends far outside the code and systems your company manages when issues appear. Using Compuware Outage Analyzer data, it is now easier to open a window to these services, seeing data collected across all c... (more)

Evolving an APM Strategy for the 21st Century

I started in the web performance industry - well before Application Performance Management (APM) existed - during a time when external, single page measurement ruled the land. In an ecosystem where no other solutions existed, it was the top of the data chain to support the rapidly evolving world of web applications. This was an effective approach to APM, as most online applications were self-contained and, compared to the modern era, relatively simple in their design. A state-of-the-art web application, circa 2000 Soon, a new solution rose to the top of the ecosystem - the synth... (more)

Super Bowl Sunday 2013 – Winners, Losers, and Casualties

No matter which team you were cheering for (or if you even watched the game at all), Super Bowl Sunday 2013 was more than a football game. Since the late 1990s, Super Bowl advertisers have tried to successfully link their TV ads to their online properties, sometimes with mixed results. Even 15 years later, companies can't always predict how well their sites will perform on the big day. But unlike the early days of TV/online campaigns, the problems are more complex than a site going down under heavy traffic. This year, some of the world's premier brands spent millions of dollars on... (more)

Holiday 2012: In the First Week of the Season, My Site Performance Was...

It's been a busy and successful seven days for online retailers. Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic and sales were well above 2011, and there was the extra benefit to those businesses that started deals on Thanksgiving Night. The traffic data collected by the Compuware Ecommerce and Retail Real use Monitoring index matched almost exactly the pattern seen by Akamai for all of their US ecommerce and retail customers on the three busiest days. Mobile Commerce Performance for many mobile sites has been cited elsewhere as being slow on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Looking at the... (more)