Last night I attended the London Web Performance Meetup.  The topic was Application Performance Monitoring and it was done by Martin Pinner of Application Performance Ltd.

There always a danger when inviting a vendor to present at a meetup or conference.  I’ve seen it too many times when the vendor can’t help but make a big pitch for their products or services.  In this respect Martin did a great job – he talked about the landscape of APM monitoring tools, and he didn’t give any special promotion of his.  It was also clear that he had a lot of experience with APM monitoring. 

What I would have loved to hear is more real-world example stories of situations where he had to deploy APM tools to solve particular problems, and the manner in which these issues were resolved.  That would have really engaged the audience.  It cannot be repeated too often enough – stories and anecdotes are the most powerful tools a presenter has.

I’m going to try and track down his slides because he did present a comprehensive survey of the tools available, many of which I haven’t heard of before.