This book draws upon cognitive and affect theory to examine applications of contemporary performance practices in educational, social and community contexts. The writing is situated in the spaces between making and performance, exploring the processes of creating work defined variously as collaborative, participatory and socially engaged.

The objective of APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management is to establish reliable application performance management (APM) practices—to demonstrate value, to do it quickly, and to adapt to the client circumstances. It's important to balance long-term goals with short-term deliverables, but without compromising usefulness or correctness. The successful strategy is to establish a few reasonable goals, achieve them quickly, and then iterate over the same topics two more times, with each successive iteration expanding the skills and capabilities of the APM team. This strategy is referred to as “Good, Better, Best”. The application performance monitoring marketplace is very focused on ease of installation, rapid time to usefulness, and overall ease of use. But these worthy platitudes do not really address the application performance management processes that ensure that you will deploy effectively, synergize on quality assurance test plans, triage accurately, and encourage collaboration across the application life cycle that ultimately lowers overall application cost and ensures a quality user experience. These are also fine platitudes but these are the ones that are of interest to your application sponsors. These are the ones for which you need to show value. This CA Press book employs this iterative approach, adapted pragmatically for the realities of your organizational and operational constraints, to realize a future state that your sponsors will find useful, predictable and manageable—and something that they will want to fund. In the meantime, you will learn the useful techniques needed to set up and maintain a useful performance management system utilizing best practices regardless of the software provider(s).

This practical book provides a step-by-step approach to testing mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before they're deployed -- a vital topic to which other books devote one chapter, if that. Businesses today live and die by network applications and web services. Because of the increasing complexity of these programs, and the pressure to deploy them quickly, many professionals don't take the time to ensure that they'll perform well and scale effectively. The Art of Application Performance Testing explains the complete life cycle of the testing process, and demonstrates best practices to help you plan, gain approval for, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. With this book, you'll learn to: Set realistic performance testing goals Implement an effective application performance testing strategy Interpret performance test results Cope with different application technologies and architectures Use automated performance testing tools Test traditional local applications, web-based applications, and web services (SOAs) Recognize and resolves issues that are often overlooked in performance tests Written by a consultant with 30 years of experience in the IT industry and over 12 years experience with performance testing, this easy-to-read book is illustrated with real-world examples and packed with practical advice. The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers you a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises. "Ian has maintained a vendor-agnostic methodology beautifully in this material. The metrics and graphs, along with background information provided in his case studies, eloquently convey to the reader, 'Methodology above all, tools at your discretion...' Ian's expertise shines through throughout the entire reading experience."-- Matt St. Onge, Enterprise Solution Architect, HCL Technologies America / Teradyne

Optimize training, enhance recovery, and improve performance with Performance Nutrition: Applying the Science of Nutrient Timing. Based on the most current research in nutrient timing, Performance Nutrition blends theory with applied content and real-life examples to help nutritionists, athletes, and coaches design nutrition plans based on each athlete’s individual needs and the specific demands of the sport. While other texts may provide a brief discussion of nutrient timing as a tool for improving sport performance, Performance Nutrition: Applying the Science of Nutrient Timing focuses solely on this newly developing facet of sport nutrition. Distinguished authors Krista Austin (a physiologist and nutritionist) and Bob Seebohar (a sport dietitian and USA Triathlon elite coach) share their extensive practical experience with athletes at all levels from recreational through professional. They provide specific nutrient timing recommendations for a wide range of sport types, including endurance, strength and power, combative (weight classified), and team sports. In particular, you will learn information on using nutrient timing theory to counteract altitude, heat and humidity, cold exposure, and air pollution. A chapter devoted to competition-day guidelines will help you keep your athletes hydrated, energized, and ready to perform. Plus, nutritional timelines, highlighted in special callout boxes and placed at the edge of the page for quick reference, offer visual plans of what athletes should eat in the hours leading up to and during competition. Practical and user friendly, this text also includes “In Practice” application exercises, mini-case studies, and four extended case studies to assist in translating the information to your own practice. Incorporating nutrient ingestion timing into your athlete’s training program can promote enhanced recovery, create positive training adaptations, improve body composition, support immunity, and ultimately enhance performance. With Performance Nutrition: Applying the Science of Nutrient Timing, you will gain the foundational knowledge and practical techniques to develop individualized nutrition programs to improve training, performance, and recovery.

Use BPF Tools to Optimize Performance, Fix Problems, and See Inside Running Systems BPF-based performance tools give you unprecedented visibility into systems and applications, so you can optimize performance, troubleshoot code, strengthen security, and reduce costs. BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability is the definitive guide to using these tools for observability. Pioneering BPF expert Brendan Gregg presents more than 150 ready-to-run analysis and debugging tools, expert guidance on applying them, and step-by-step tutorials on developing your own. You’ll learn how to analyze CPUs, memory, disks, file systems, networking, languages, applications, containers, hypervisors, security, and the kernel. Gregg guides you from basic to advanced tools, helping you generate deeper, more useful technical insights for improving virtually any Linux system or application. • Learn essential tracing concepts and both core BPF front-ends: BCC and bpftrace • Master 150+ powerful BPF tools, including dozens created just for this book, and available for download • Discover practical strategies, tips, and tricks for more effective analysis • Analyze compiled, JIT-compiled, and interpreted code in multiple languages: C, Java, bash shell, and more • Generate metrics, stack traces, and custom latency histograms • Use complementary tools when they offer quick, easy wins • Explore advanced tools built on BPF: PCP and Grafana for remote monitoring, eBPF Exporter, and kubectl-trace for tracing Kubernetes • Foreword by Alexei Starovoitov, creator of the new BPF BPF Performance Tools will be an indispensable resource for all administrators, developers, support staff, and other IT professionals working with any recent Linux distribution in any enterprise or cloud environment.

Because performance is paramount today, this thoroughly updated guide shows you how to test mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before you deploy them—whether it’s to the cloud or a mobile device. You’ll learn the complete testing process lifecycle step-by-step, along with best practices to plan, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. Set realistic performance testing goals Implement an effective application performance testing strategy Interpret performance test results Cope with different application technologies and architectures Understand the importance of End User Monitoring (EUM) Use automated performance testing tools Test traditional local applications, web applications, and web services Recognize and resolves issues often overlooked in performance tests Written by a consultant with over 15 years’ experience with performance testing, The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises.

This book provides a holistic and pragmatic approach to performance management throughout the business value chain, and demonstrates the optimal design and use of performance management in order to achieve competitive advantage. A wealth of best practices, case studies and real-world examples are used to reveal the diversity of performance measurement methods, methodologies and principles in practice. Readers will gain comprehensive insights into the status quo of performance management, including primary functions such as supply, operations and sales, and secondary functions like finance, human resources, and information systems. Focusing on ‘best-in-class’ performance excellence, the book offers the ideal guide for any organization pursuing competitive advantages across all corporate functions and focusing on value-adding activities.