Studying the Effectiveness of Application Performance Management (APM) Tools for Detecting Performance Regressions for Web Applications: An Experience Report

Performance regressions, such as a higher CPU utilization than in the previous version of an application, are caused by software application updates that negatively affect the performance of an application.Although a plethora of mining software repository research has been done to detect such regressions, research tools are generally not readily available to practitioners. Application Performance Management (APM) tools are commonly used in practice for detecting performance issues in the field by mining operational data.In contrast to performance regression detection tools that assume a changing code base and a stable workload, APM tools mine operational data to detect performance anomalies caused by a changing workload in an otherwise stable code base. Although APM tools are widely used in practice, no research has been done to understand 1) whether APM tools can identify performance regressions caused by code changes and 2) how well these APM tools support diagnosing the root-cause of these regressions.In this paper, we explore if the readily accessible APM tools can help practitioners detect performance regressions. We perform a case study using three commercial (AppDynamics, New Relic and Dynatrace) and one open source (Pinpoint) APM tools. In particular, we examine the effectiveness of leveraging these APM tools in detecting and diagnosing injected performance regressions (excessive memory usage, high CPU utilization and inefficient database queries) in three open source applications. We find that APM tools can detect most of the injected performance regressions, making them good candidates to detect performance regressions in practice. However, there is a gap between mining approaches that are proposed in state-of-the-art performance regression detection research and the ones used by APM tools. In addition, APM tools lack the ability to be extended, which makes it hard to enhance them when exploring novel mining approaches for detecting performance regressions.