Last week we hosted a presentation by AppDynamics customer, Priceline, along with an informative customer roundtable on application performance. During our roundtable, we polled the audience on their challenges with application performance – we asked questions about their architectures, development philosophies, common performance problems, downtime and visibility. Roughly 100 attendees from companies big and small responded.

The results were interesting. Here’s a look at what we found:

When asked about performance challenges, 88% of respondents noted they’ve experienced application performance problems in the last 12 months. The most common performance issues cited were Slow Response, Stalls, Errors and Memory Leaks. (Stay tuned this August for our upcoming blog series on what you should know about the Top 5 App Performance Challenges).

Additionally, 67% of respondents said they struggled to determine the root cause of their application performance problem in a timely manner, and roughly 33% responded that end-users called the helpdesk to complain about poor online experiences. Surprisingly, only 42% of participants admitted that they’ve experienced production downtime.

When asked to share some information about their application environments, participants responded that:

• 73% have a multi-tier, distributed application
• 70% leverage both open source and commercial application infrastructure (i.e. app servers)
• 52% say they follow an agile development philosophy
• 82% said that they lack visibility in key areas of their application

For the most part, we weren’t surprised by these answers. We hear from our customers everyday that they are shifting toward SOA, virtualization and cloud computing infrastructures. These responses also confirmed our experience that many organizations have built JBoss and Tomcat into their application architectures, whereas five years ago most companies would primarily have had WebLogic or WebSphere.

Its also not surprising that such a large number of respondents had experienced issues with performance. Distributed applications, especially those that use a mix of open source and proprietary components, are extremely difficult to monitor and troubleshoot. They often contain blind spots that result in critical performance problems.

Nor was it surprising that the majority of companies lack visibility into their applications. This is the most common refrain we hear when talking to companies for the first time. It doesn’t matter if they are running a $10 billion dollar business or a $10 million dollar business…visibility is always a concern. At the end of the day, “You can’t manage what you can’t see.”

Management really is the kicker. Web-applications have become transaction-oriented and revenue-critical, and it is more important than ever to be able to not only monitor, but quickly diagnose and fix performance issues before they impact your business.

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics, application development, application monitoring, cloud computing

I recently had a chance to visit the webcast “This Week in Cloud Computing” and share some of my thoughts about cloud trends and application performance management. One thread of the conversation that I found particularly interesting was the discussion of agility in cloud computing. Although this theme comes up from time to time, most discussions I hear on cloud computing focus on cost-cutting and security.

These are extremely important concerns, of course — security in particular can be seen as a prerequisite of any sound cloud computing strategy. But there’s a “forest for the trees” risk in focusing too much on cloud computing pitfalls in lieu of recognizing its benefits, of which agility is certainly a major component.

We’re seeing with our own customers the need to be even more agile than before, of scrums becoming common and engineering stand-ups becoming a way of life. Any process change that helps speed up the application deployment chain is more than just a “nice to have;” it’s a sea change in the ability of companies to deliver value to their end users.

Bernard Golden makes some interesting points about two types of cloud computing agility in this discussion on CIO – definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the topic.

In case you missed the live webcast last week, here’s the video:

APM Thought Leadership, application development, cloud computing, hybrid clouds, public clouds

AppDynamics recently had the privilege of speaking at the first U.S.-based DevOps event, held at the LinkedIn corporation in Santa Clara. We had some web operations rock stars on hand–including John Allspaw from Etsy, John Willis from Opscode, and Patrick Debois, father of the DevOps movement.

But perhaps the true stars of the event were the 200+ operations and development people in the audience–because it was their Tweets, questions, and ongoing feedback during the event that made it so much fun. Therefore, presented without further commentary, is our personal list of the best quotes from Dev Ops Days:

“If it isn’t monitored, it isn’t production!”

“In Ops you can never exceed expectations, because the expectation is 100% up-time.”

“No matter how careful or good you are, sh!t will happen.”

“If you’re in Ops – you better have metrics. When in doubt – make *&#!@# graphs!”

“Traditional metrics of cpu and memory usage don’t matter to your customers. How ’bout measuring what really matters to your customers?”

“Whether you use ITIL or not is not important – what matters is if you can measure if you are improving!”

“In most organizations, Dev and Ops have misaligned goals. Dev is measured by the number of new features. Ops is measured by 100% uptime. Question: What’s the best way to get 100% uptime? Answer: Don’t introduce any new features or make any changes.”

“The relationship between dev and ops in a company is defined by the release process. You will understand the relationship if you examine this process.”

“If Ops goes to lunch with Ops and Dev goes to lunch with Dev, a low level of efficiency is a certainty.”

“Lack of trust in an organization is really expensive. You can’t villianize others if you know their kids.”

“Ops now has the same pride in their tools that Dev has always had.”

“One part of DevOps is bringing Dev culture and tools into Ops – version control, testing tools, automation tools, and repeatibility with “observability” ”

“Limit your liability by making very small incremental changes.”

“Fail quick, fail often, recover quickly.”

“Lots of focus at web 2.0 startups on new features…but very little focus on the “abilities” – scalability, flexibility, durability.”

“What you need to do is hire smart people and give them root. @#$% Yeah!”

“Even if your organization is not agile, release all the time so that you are experienced when it matters.”

“Unplanned work steals time from planned work.”

application development, DevOps, IT operations