Why APM Is Not the Same As ML Monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) has become the cornerstone of software engineering allowing engineering teams to quickly identify and remedy production issues. However, as the world moves to intelligent software applications that are built using machine learning, traditional APM quickly becomes insufficient to identify and remedy production issues encountered in these modern software applications. As a lead software engineer at NewRelic, my team built high-performance monitoring systems including Insights, Mobile, and SixthSense. As I transitioned to building ML Monitoring software, I found the architectural principles and design choices underlying APM to not be a good fit for this brand new world. In fact, blindly following APM designs led us down paths that would have been better left unexplored. In this talk, I draw upon my (and my team’s) experience building an ML Monitoring system from the ground up and deploying it on customer workloads running large-scale ML training with Spark as well as