Recently, one of our customers, let’s call him PointInFact, had a very typical problem. After deploying a new version of its software, some user requests degraded horribly. Requests that should have taken half a second took up to a minute. Interestingly, the PointInFact team runs a multi-tenant SaaS solution in the AWS Cloud and relies heavily on cloud services. This reliance makes User Experience Management and fault domain isolation very challenging.
Back Story: Application Running in the AWS Cloud
PointInFact runs a SaaS service. Internally this results in a multi-tenant service where each customer has his own instance of the application he subscribes to. All of these applications and services are hosted in Amazon’s EC2 Cloud where they dynamically create new application environments and offload some functionality to AWS by using the provided services. As a SaaS business, customer satisfaction is very important to them, as a consequence they monitor all applications and services centrally and from an end-user and server-side perspective with Compuware APM.