Over the past few days, we’ve shot past 2001 downloads of our free java performance tool, AppDynamics Lite. What does that mean? Well, first and foremost, it’s an excuse to post a picture of the monolith from the movie 2001:

Equally as important, perhaps, is that the milestone of 2K downloads in only a matter of weeks indicates just how much the market wanted a tool like AppDynamics Lite. We’re finding that our users are resonating with its simple message: “the first java performance tool designed for production.” There are profilers aplenty, but until now there’s been nothing that can work in production–digging down into code-level details–without creating excessive overhead.

Who are these users? They represent quite a range. We’ve seen Fortune 500 companies, up-and-coming SaaS shops, mid-sized companies, students, consultants…and, of course, our competitors.

We’re continuing to refine and improve the tool based on user feedback in our forums, so it’s worth noting that the version of AppDynamics Lite now available for download is a new version. It includes an improved ability to take diagnostic snapshots of performance problems, as well as a feature that alerts the user when new updates and fixes are available.

AppDynamics Lite will always run in tandem with our commercial product. It will never carry a price tag, and we will continue to update and refine it. It’s a great way to introduce new users to the way we see the world of application performance management.

Download the new version of AppDynamics Lite here.

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics lite

How much time will your customers spend on your web site if it slows to a crawl? Will they linger patiently, or will they immediately surf away to a competitor?

According to a 2009 research study by Forrester Consulting, 47% of users expect a web page to load in two seconds or less–and 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Those time measurements have doubled from a similar study published in 2006; as transfer speeds have increased, users expect their web sites to keep pace.

From these numbers, it’s easy to understand the incredible impact of lost revenue for every second that an application performs poorly. Unacceptable performance is a surefire way to cause the end user to surf away and perhaps never return. What is the cost of a transaction taking 4 seconds, when it should only take 1 second? Again, according to the 2009 Forrester study, a matter of seconds constitutes the average online shopper’s expectation for a web page to load. Can you measure customer frustration in terms of its actual revenue impact upon your organization?

The way to measure lost revenue due to poor performance is to determine the application’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs), attach revenue to them, and evaluate how much your organization can preserve through maintaining and even improving those SLAs. For example: how long should the “check out” transaction take? How long should the “add to cart” transaction take?

Once you determine these time frames, you can attach dollar numbers to each of them. For example, let’s say that your SLA is to have the “pay my bill” transaction on a banking site take 1 second. Let’s say that for every time that SLA is violated, the company loses 5 dollars in revenue—due to the aggregate result of some users abandoning their sessions to slow performance.

If the organization is able to determine how often the “pay my bill” transaction is being violated, it can assign a revenue number to the ability to maintain that SLA over time—say, a 99.99% success rate at maintaining the SLAs of 50,000 transactions over a three month period. If the previous success rate had only been 90%, that means 5,000 successful transactions have been rescued. At 5 dollars a transaction, this becomes $25,000 in revenue that never leaves the bottom line.

Obviously, determining and maintaining SLAs can take a lot of work. But the right application performance management system can assist you by learning the behavior of the application, and by creating dynamic baselines that can dramatically help reduce your time to develop SLAs. And once you develop those SLAs, and attach revenue numbers to them, you will quickly see how managing application performance on a proactive basis can help protect your company’s revenue stream.

APM Thought Leadership, dynamic baselines, ROI