It’s only been a few weeks, but AppDynamics recently reached the benchmark of 500 downloads of our free product, AppDynamics Lite.

So far the response has been amazing. Dev and ops alike seem to enjoy having a free tool that they can use to troubleshoot java performance in production–as opposed to having to do everything in development with the usual suspects (overhead-causing profiling tools, duct tape and wads of cotton, etc).

So what’s next? Well, AppDynamics Lite is a beta product. We’re continuing to refine it based on user feedback–and we’re going to keep distributing it to the masses. We’re not ever going to charge for it, and we’re going to keep improving it. We continue to believe that it shouldn’t be necessary for IT operations and development teams to pull out their credit cards in order to douse one-off fires in java production environments.

If you’re a user of Lite, we encourage you to visit our forums. This is where we’re offering support for Lite installation and troubleshooting, as well as simply taking in feedback from Lite users. Our engineers monitor the forum constantly (some might say obsessively), and they answer questions as soon as they come in.

And just to make it worth your while…if you use the forums to post an idea for an enhancement that we end up putting into the product, we’ll send you one of our cool, new AppDynamics T-shirts!

So check out AppDynamics Lite and join the forums. We’ll see you there!

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If you’re thinking about moving to the cloud, you’re not alone.

From what we hear, the majority of IT departments are planning to at least take tentative steps into the cloud. They’re enticed by the promise of elastic computing for mission-critical applications, and they want the ability to only pay for what they need. They’re excited by the prospect of being able to provision for capacity solely when the application requires it, versus the bad economics of always provisioning for peak usage.

As a previous post indicated, this doesn’t mean that people will start throwing their mission-critical apps into production in the cloud. It will be a gradual deployment, starting with private clouds and moving on to hybrid clouds. But it will happen, and in greater numbers.

However, before the cloud becomes your destination, it’s necessary to first master application performance and gain complete visibility into your app. That includes having a correlated understanding of application load/throughput over time, and knowing which tiers and services need to be scaled up or down.

Doing so is the only way to get to a dynamically scaled, close-loop system–which is the end goal of cloud-based applications.

To get there, some homework is required. It’s a 3-step process for most applications to get to the point of a closed-loop system, and it’s not necessarily an easy goal to reach:

Step 1: Get full visibility into the application performance and the performance dynamics of all its moving parts, as well as how they change with load.

Step 2: Gain the ability to automate the provisioning of application services.

Step 3: Acquire the intelligence to combine the above two steps in a closed loop system.

Do steps 1 & 2 before you take your first step into the cloud–then do #3 once you’re in the cloud.

Different organizations will journey through these steps at different rates of speed and efficiency. Some will simply rearchitect their applications, or create them from scratch–but for most, it will take them some time to complete them. For some, it may even take years.

However, it’s necessary to gain visibility into the app before you gain the ability to automate provisioning. And it’s only with automated provisioning–and the intelligence to turn it into a closed-loop system–can you consider deploying the app in new environments.

Just as passing final exams is required before you get a diploma, solving application performance is a pre-requisite for moving into the cloud.

APM Thought Leadership, cloud automation, cloud computing

We announced the AppDynamics Lite Edition today, which is available at no charge. It’s the first Java performance troubleshooting tool designed for production environments that can be installed in 2 minutes, and allow people to start troubleshooting problems in less than 15 minutes.

To put it another way, this tool provides 80% of the value of legacy APM providers–and it doesn’t cost a dime. Why are we comfortable giving away such a powerful solution?

Many of us at AppDynamics have spent years supporting mission-critical production environments as developers and performance engineers, and we know how frustrating it is to get any visibility into performance dynamics when all you have available is some logs. In those situations, we always wished we had some simple way to inject instrumentation in the production server and get much more visibility. Unfortunately, that was always a very painful process. By introducing a free tool called AppDynamics Lite, we have ensured that the Java Performance Engineering and Production Support community has that capability.

The job of ensuring performance in production environments has always been difficult. And with the complexity of open-source, SOA, and cloud architectures, it’s not getting any easier. What Production Support teams need to do their job is:

1. Have the ability to quickly troubleshoot when problems happen in production–in other words, a way to engage in the Fire Fight.

2. Be able to proactively monitor the application and identify problems before they start impacting the business.

3. Know how to intelligently analyze monitoring data, identify trends, and plan for future.

4. Be able to automate common remediations (something that becomes very important in the cloud).

With AppDynamics Lite, we are providing the ability to quickly troubleshoot and address a performance Firefight for free–no strings attached. So that’s item #1 you can check off the list.

For items #2-4, you will have to purchase our Standard or the Cloud Editions. But firefighting? That’s free thanks to AppDynamics Lite.

Our motivation to equip the community with a tool that they desperately need, and which they have never had. In doing so, of course, we will create a vibrant user community that will ultimately be receptive to our Standard and Cloud Editions. But in the meantime, we think AppDynamics Lite delivers a pretty sweet deal for both us and the communities we serve–and that it will put out a lot of fires!

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