Cameron Laird's personal notes on writing for Real User Monitoring

In July 2012, I substituted for vacationing Ron Miller in his more-or-less daily blog for Real User Monitoring. A month later, I resumed posting. Since that time, the publisher has tinkered with the frequency, and, most recently, settled on two tracks, the "Real User Monitoring blog", and the "Application Monitor". I've posted

• "More Than Just One Thing: the many faces of Application Performance Management", a DZone Big Link,
• "Three upcoming events for performance specialists",
• "Subtle but important: three smart performance pieces",
• "Emphasis on flexibility elevates IT to strategic realm",
• "IT Important Part of 'Balancing Act' of Modern Medicine",
• "Eliminate Outages: the engineering challenge",
• "'Continuous Operations' a great idea--but details of execution still matter",
• "VDI stuck in niche",
• "Do What Matters: Improve System Performance",
• "Services and Subscriptions: the future of software",
• "Mobile particularly needs DevOps",
• "Monitor even what you trust: a non-linear imperative",
• "TestOps: catching a new trend in performance management",
• "Quickstart Guide to DevOps", a DZone Big Link,
• "Bottlenecks and flowmeters: models for performance management",
• "Assets and Liabilities in the Datacenter", a DZone Big Link
• "Webpage bloat accelerates"
• "Whither VDI"
• "Strategic Thinking in the Datacenter"
• "Five networking thoughts you should be thinking"
• "Freedom, responsibility, and testing: lessons for DevOps"
• "VMware redefines its strategy for availability monitoring; so should you"
• "Two good independent surveys of application performance management practices"
• "'Performance' means something new in a rationalized cloud architecture"
• "Networking progress is more than just incremental bandwidth and lower prices"
• "Make the many ROIs work for you: correct analysis of service-oriented architecture"
• "High-profile RFP application in Washington a showcase for mash-up approach"
• "Standardize the Datacenter: Single-source for success"
• "Application Performance Management indispensable for your career"
• "Application performance management crucial as gaming expands in geographic, technical, and social reach"
• "The sky is falling: leading e-commerce sites degrade customer experience", a DZone Big Link
• "APM pays off"
• "Choice of technologies for leak monitoring in Java applications", a DZone Big Link
• "New era for network pricing"
• "Lawsuit Provides Peek Behind Curtain of Online Financial Transactions"
• "Windows functions make for better SQL", a DZone Big Link
• "Information Technology in the 2013 Kenyan national election"
• "Marissa reads logs: Yahoo management and data"
• "Non-traditional APM multiplies profits"
• "When Data and Application Come Together: Specific Performance Opportunities"
• "VBCA: Big Risks, Big Rewards in the Cloud"
• "Bring Data and Applications Practices Together for Best Performance"
• "Quality independent trade publication endorses importance of APM"
• "BigData too often BadData"
• "'Technical debt' in modern business"
• "The Rocky Relationship of APM and SIEM"
• "Virtualize Everything"
• "Character Traits for Success in APM"
• "Not all Distribution Networks are the same: ADN vs. CDN"
• "Forgotten scaling: the role of APM in customer support"
• "Top-level categories: APM's potential with big-budget items"
• "A diagram for cloud analysis: the big picture"
• "A Thoughtful Report on the Future of APM"
• "End-User Mechanics of APM"
• "Anticipations: APM in 2013"
• "APM future bright--if more focused"
• "APM for HPC"
• "APM the antidote to stale metrics"
• "The heartbreak of packet loss-cured!"
• "Storage now dominates performance"
• "The efficiency of branch office IT"
• "RUM only beginning its APM relationship"
• "VARs a natural home for APM"
• "Trends to watch: SDN"
• "No time to give up on APM"
• "APM for mobile apps"
• "Goldilocks' APM: not too little, not too much"
• "High-level and low-level revision-control tips for the datacenter"

For the "Real User Monitoring blog", I've written:

• "Safety of WebSockets and other advanced parts of HTML5", a DZone Big Link,
• "Error-handling: a fable in code", a DZone Big Link,
• "Server-sent events a good choice for datacenter monitors',
• "Three performance tips: measurements and techniques to pay off for the long haul", a DZone Big Link
• "True scientfic revolution: radical sharing",
• "PowerShell to the Rescue! Tactical language with strategic impact"
• "HTML5 vs native an important, but not obvious, choice", a DZone Big Link,
• "Hail humble CGI: active Web pages for the working sysad",
• "Three main choices for advanced communications in HTML5", a DZone Big Link
• "The true meaning of 'declarative'", a DZone Big Link
• "Your Next Computing Language Should Be ...", a DZone Big Link
• "Performance matters when writing, too: more SQL tips", a DZone Big Link,
• "Monitoring tools leverage expertise, not replace it",
• "Expect for DevOps",
• "Four tips for DevOps migrating to the software-defined datacenter: techniques for managing technical debt",
• "Quality matters: invisible lines of code and their all-too-visible real-world impacts", a DZone Big Link
• "Technical debt in system administration", a DZone Big Link
• "Combinatorics of technical debt: communicative power of a metaphor"
• "Blessings of technical debt and the impact on SDN"
• "HTML5 realities: practical, constrained, and promising"
• "Trends in online gaming"
• "End-user experience more important than technology to gaming customers"
• "Outage happens"
• "'Social' more important than flawed IBM sales pitch"
• "Chromebooks in the datacenter"
• "Datacenter trends: energy and siting"
• "Idiomatic Programming and the Fitness of APM"
• "The Programmers Shall Always Be With You" (a DZone Big Link)
• "Datacenter Geography"
• "Optimism about datacenter energy use"
• "Larger realities of energy in the datacenter"
• "Pick the right monitoring tool"
• "Energy costs, energy savings"
• "An analyst's APM insight"
• "Strategic approach to security in a cloudy environment"
• "APM supports other IT functions"
• "What's In? What's Out? Where the Edges Are in the World of Application Monitoring"
• "Sky's the limit: strategic APM"
• "Start your cloud journey in the right direction"
• "Bloat costs millions"
• "Higher-level datacenter planning"
• "Lessons in tooling: OBI 11g"
• "Trends for successful datacenters: virtualization, cloud, storage"
• "Appliances in the Datacenter: Challenge for Judgment"
• "Bank attacks more, and less, serious than earlier feared"
• "Chicken Little in the Datacenter"
• "Letting go"
• "Evolve or die ... or hunker down"
• "Get what you're after with your private cloud"
• "Customize your APM"
• "Scripting Oracle WebLogic and other resources: another level of refactoring"
• "Four reactions to 'MySQL Benchmarking Best Practices'"
• "The good and bad of virtualization: make the most of it in your own career"
• "Improve efficiency--but also improve strategy"
• "The moving APM target: through to ADN"
• "Taking Your Career into the Cloud"
• "Letting go the hardest part of some careers"
• "Storm of APM Challenges"
• "RFID Timely in the Datacenter"
• "Varieties of Application Performance Management"
• "A Day in the IT Life: saying the obvious"
• "How much does IT globalization pay off?"
• "Introspection: making the best of broken database operations"
• "APEX continues rapid ascent"
• "Africa does IT"
• "The Time for Application Performance Management is Now"
• "Oracle and HTML5 Forms: Validation is Another Form of Early Error-catching", a DZone Big Link
• "Oracle, encodings, deployment discipline, and other performance considerations", a DZone Big Link
• "Lost in the Cloud"
• "Little Mystery in Amazon's Outage";
• "Mission-Critical App Delivery";
• "Reliability of Cloud-based applications", picked up as a DZone Big Link.

Other columns I've written in recent years appear here. I've also published over five hundred commissioned articles on information technology and related topics. [Add career comments.]