Okay, admit it. The title Spot the Difference in AppDynamics 3.4 caught your attention, especially after we just recently announced our free End User Monitoring features, and now you’re here to find out what other insanely cool stuff we’ve been working on to enhance the experience for APM aficionados, customers and people like you! I’m proud to say that AppDynamics continues to innovate by leaps and bounds which enables our customers to be more successful in how they manage application performance and availability.

Here’s an example of us staying ahead of the curve. I was scouring Twitter feeds several weeks back and found this tweet from a Java applications guy,

Hmmmm, a proverbial question indeed.

So what exactly changes with an application release?

Flashback to 2008…I ran into a painfully similar situation back at LG. We had a team of consultants working on Java performance optimizations for eight months, executing test cases, refactoring application code, disabling trigger objects and even redesigning some of the use case workflows. Well, it turns out the build and deployment team pushed the entire application onto a completely different set of infrastructure, and when the new test results came back we almost choked when we saw 20-30% regressions in application performance. That night the performance team drank itself into oblivion, and you can imagine what happened next.

For the next two weeks everyone on the project was now heads down trying to identify what changes caused such a massive slowdown to the system. Remember, we didn’t have an APM solution like AppDynamics, and had to resort to using four different performance monitoring tools, since we didn’t have a single solution that provided us with complete end-to-end visibility. Those were tumultuous times when Ops, Dev and IT teams engaged in heated arguments about who was at fault.

All of this could have been easily avoided if we had something like AppDynamics 3.4 Agile Release Analysis to compare application releases visually. Having this type of comparative analysis capability comes in handy when you’re trying to understand why a user login transaction, for instance, is slower with your latest agile release than what it was a week ago. You could always conduct code diffs on your releases, but sometimes it’s incredibly valuable to be able to visualize performance infrastructure changes at a glance rather than having to spend hours or even days manually verifying what differences actually occurred.

Agile Release Analysis

AppDynamics release analysis rolls up application performance metrics so you can compare KPIs of not only the application, but also individual business transactions, as well as their flow and execution. The application might’ve have gotten slower, but being able to identify which piece of the overall application or specific transaction is affecting performance is much more useful to operations and IT.

Speaking of comparing Application Flow Maps, in order for this feature to be truly tenable, we needed to improve the visibility challenges customers were facing with our original flow map. We had the right idea, but it was too rigid. Monitoring several thousand tiers became blinding for some customers, leaving App Ops with a cluttered forest, and no trees. So to stay true to our company mission with offering customers with maximum visibility with minimal effort, we improved the viewing experience so you can now navigate your entire application just like you’d navigate the entire world with Google Maps. The next time you’re notified there’s an issue with a transaction that’s traversing through a particular node in a cluster, you can feel confident it’ll be easy to spot and zoom in on. The application flow maps now change color in real-time depending on the SLA and performance of application tiers and the flows that connect them. For example, here is a screenshot of the new flow map with baseline comparison enabled:

Zoom in and out of your App Flow Map

Introducing Role-Based Perspectives

Let’s assume the role of a database administrator for a moment. Sure, they might look at Java or .NET code once in a blue moon, but their technical domain is managing the backend of the application. So in 3.4 we decided to streamline the troubleshooting process from a role-based perspective to help our respective backend admins “get to the point” and view information pertinent to their role.

“Show me the top SQL calls for my database.” Done.

“Okay, now which business transactions do my SQL queries impact?” You can think of it as a “Where Used” look up that allows the DBA to analyze what they’re interested in from a role-based perspective and see how queries are contributing to business transaction performance. The Backend Specialists – DBA, Message Broker, ESB and Security Administers – can now say with conviction, “I optimized my backend service that was impacting the user experience of several mission critical business transactions.” That’s what I call getting bang for the buck performance optimizations!

Reporting on Application AND Business Activity.

AppDynamics 3.4 also includes a new PDF reporting engine so you can generate, save and share reports detailing application health metrics. We’ve introduced several prepackaged reports as well as the ability to create your own custom report. All of the aforementioned cool 3.4 features offer some amazing technical benefits that speak to those in DevOps, but at the end of the day, someone is going to ask how this is impacting your business’s bottom line. So in 3.4, we now allow you to build a dashboard that monitors business activity for your most revenue-critical apps. Albeit, our technology is pretty slick as it is to auto-discover and baseline your application’s performance without the need for manual instrumentation. However, there may be users or scenarios where you may want to monitor the activity and revenue of your application, rather than say its performance or throughput. No problem – you can exploit “Information Points” in AppDynamics to track any business metric or value which is part of a business transaction. Our intuitive dashboard builder lets you expose any metric with drag and drop widgets meaning you can create powerful business views in minutes.

There are a number of other powerful features and product enhancements in AppDynamics 3.4 you can start exploring today by registering here for a 30-day free trial. If you’re already an AppDynamics customer, we look forward to hearing more feedback on how we can improve the experience even further and want to say thanks again! We hope you’re as delighted as we are about our latest release.

apm, App Flow Map, appdynamics, Backend Monitoring, dashboards, End User Monitoring, Release Analysis, reporting, role-based perspectives

Surprised? I guess not. It’s not like the the APM market was in desperate need of another End User Monitoring (EUM) solution right? However, before you assume this announcement is just pure marketing spin – it’s worth taking a few minutes out to understand why the EUM solution AppDynamics has brought to the market is WAY different than the rest.

A good place to begin is with our mission – deliver maximum monitoring visibility thru minimal effort. Everything we do and deliver has to work out-of-the-box for our customers, and it has to install in minutes and be intuitive enough so anyone in IT can exploit its benefits. With this in mind, we simply added EUM as a feature to AppDynamics Pro – our market leading application performance management (APM) solution for modern distributed applications. Rather than burden our customers with another agent, another product, another UI and another license fee, we decided to make it really simple and attractive for organizations to deploy and experience APM and End User Monitoring.

Free, I hear you say? Surely, free means that your new EUM solution isn’t very valuable? Wrong.

APM Must be Affordable for Everyone

Have you ever bought a new car and got really upset when you look at the spec you want, and see a bunch of options which have added several thousands to the final invoice?  You have one price for the car and a price for every option along with costs on top for servicing and maintenance. This buying experience is almost identical to how organizations buy APM solutions from vendors today with multiple products, plugins and support contracts.

Cost of purchase, deployment and ownership are becoming key considerations for APM buyers. AppDynamics thought it would be a bit cheeky to charge for what is essentially a feature or dimension of APM given hundreds of customers have already invested in AppDynamics Pro. Free is also great value when you consider than AppDynamics now provides all 5 dimensions of APM in a single, integrated and scalable solution, which can be delivered on-premise or as a service (SaaS).

Same Product, Same Secret Sauce, New Visibility

Our new EUM solution works out-of-the-box. The good news is that it’s the same box that our Transaction Profiling, Performance Analytics, Application Mapping and Deep Diagnostics comes out of. That means a single product, user interface, install and deployment but now with extended performance monitoring visibility across End Users, Geographies and Browsers.

For example, here is one of the cool features in our EUM solution which shows a geographical SLA view of End User Experience for a given application. Each bubble represents the End User Experience for a given country; the size of the bubble is relative to business transaction volume, and the color is relative to SLA of the user experience (green good, red bad).

It’s now possible to view the real End User response time for all business transactions in an application – in terms of the browser, network and server-side latency contribution.

We also now visualize the End User and network time as part of Application and Business Transactions flows as shown below.

Exploiting EUM data with Performance Analytics

Key ingredients of the AppDynamics secret sauce is our behavioral learning and analytics technology, which can automatically discover and learn the normal performance of every business transaction in an application. This is very important so that AppDynamics Pro captures the right data at the right time, thus ensuring the APM user gets quality of information over quantity. Our new EUM data now feeds our real-time analytics engine so that End User, Browser and network metrics can be dynamically baselined so that AppDynamics can understand what the normal End User Experience really is. This ensures the alerts we send are highly accurate and relevant, ensuring that operations is the first to know of End User issues rather than the last to know via hate mail or angry phone calls.

Support for Modern Web 2.0 and Cloud Applications

Just like application architectures have evolved with SOA, Cloud and Big Data technologies – we’re starting to see plenty evolution in how the user interfaces are being delivered. In the good old days you had JavaServerPages and ActiveServerPages combined with some CSS and perhaps a dash of JavaScript if you dared. The user experience was static, synchronous, repetitive, slow and if I’m honest, pretty dull at times relative to what we have today.

The way you monitored the End User Experience back then was to either monitor the Server (which is pretty much where all the logic was) or the network using concepts like packet capture via a network appliance. Unfortunately today, the likes of Amazon EC2, RackSpace and Windows Azure won’t let you rock up to their data center, wheel out a network appliance, and hook it up to one of their span ports or network taps. By all means you can try, but you might be waiting a long time.

Today, application logic is moving from the Server to the Browser to offer a more interactive and slick user experience, leveraging asynchronous event driven communication and a range of browser plugins (i.e. Adobe Flash & Microsoft Silverlight) as well as web toolkit frameworks (GWT, Dojo, JQuery). Application logic in the browser means more processing occurs on the client, and more processing means more latency–which can obviously impact the end user experience. It was therefore imperative for AppDynamics to be able to monitor this latency for modern web 2.0 and Cloud Applications. That’s why we came up with an innovative way to make it happen.

How does AppDynamics EUM work?

AppDynamics went with a web page script injection agent for EUM so we could get complete browser visibility and see the REAL End User Experience. It allows us to dynamically monitor the End User Experience for any application in any location with no code changes, network appliances or configuration. If you’ve installed AppDynamics Lite or Pro, you’ll know how easy it is to be installed and deployed in minutes. And we had to follow the same principles for our EUM agent, otherwise this capability would never be adopted in large, complex and highly dynamic environments. We also made our EUM architecture and implementation truly scalable for enterprise applications that have billions of business transactions running through them everyday across thousands of application tiers. If our EUM solution wasn’t scalable, it wouldn’t matter how good it was–it would never end up being adopted by our customers.

In fact, we’ve already had some amazing early customer success with AppDynamics EUM. Check out today’s press release, which has quotes from both Fox News and Colorado State University.

If you want to try AppDynamics in your organization you can register here for a 30-day free trial.

App Man.

AppDynamics Pro, End User Experience Monitoring, End User Monitoring, EUEM, EUM, Real User Monitoring, RUM

A new year, a new iPhone and a new quarter. What else is new? How about a new company?

Last month I was fortunate enough to join a stellar marketing team at one of the fastest growing enterprise software startups in the bay area. The company you ask? AppDynamics, and did I mention we’re also the leading next generation Application Performance Management (APM) provider for modern architectures in distributed, cloud, virtualized and on-premise environments? We exceeded our targets for 2011 achieving an astonishing 400% growth in bookings. Not too shabby for being the new kid on the block in a competitive market already inundated with vendors. You have old school APM tools from megavendors like CA, HP and Compuware (was dynaTrace). Then you have the new school breed such as New Relic and AppDynamics. In fact, Gartner’s MQ lists over twenty vendors. So with such a crowded market why did I even consider such a move?

Well there’s a laundry list of reasons, but here are the top ones that come to mind.

1. Business Innovation. This is another kind of BI not just Business Intelligence. It’s really a breath of fresh air to be working with an organization that is not only obsessed with pumping out insanely great technology every few quarters or so, but also open to embracing innovative approaches to every discipline of the business including creative marketing and sales strategies. Often times enterprise software companies unabashedly attempt to cloak themselves in slideware selling a “vision” or an enterprise solution poles apart from reality. Unfortunately when it comes down to an actual evaluation, you end up having to attend a dozen meetings just to see an applicable demo, a one week to two month proof-of-concept followed by throwing millions of dollars at consulting and implementation services, which segues to my next point.

2. Ease-of-Use. This simple yet powerful concept has been repeatedly neglected or intentionally ignored by many enterprise software companies. Luckily, the Leaders of the New School such as Apple, Salesforce, Box, etc. (not Busta Rhymes group) have changed the way end users value an intuitive user interface and design. At AppDynamics, we’ve adopted a similar mindshare. “Easy” is the new world order in this industry because the managers, engineers and folks in IT operations are encountering enough complexity as it is with these modern architectures. I doubt the last thing that they want is another tool to further complicate their lives causing more frustration on the job. At the end of the day everyone is a consumer – the least common denominator – who wants to use software that helps us demystify our lives and makes us successful at our jobs (unless you’re a sadist).

Software that is easy to install, implement and use can have a tremendous impact on the bottom-line of a business. Suppose you end up rolling out a new system but end up having to spend a chunk of company change on implementation and training costs. What impact does that have on your productivity and ultimately your company’s bottom-line? Here’s an example from Avon’s Q3, 2011 earnings transcript,

“Despite extensive pre-implementation testing, we had greater than anticipated implementation challenges in the go-live. Significantly higher business complexity in this market contributed to a greater than expected level of disruption, as I said, when we went to the go-live environment.”

Many vendors make enterprise deployments akin to embarking on an IT version of manifest destiny. I’m sure you can think of a few applications in your own IT toolbox that fit the bill where at some point you ended up asking yourself, “Why can’t this be as easy as [fill in the blank with some consumer app]?”  Fig. 2. See empathetic frustrated user to your left.

That was compelling enough for me to join AppDynamics. We truly understand the business significance as to why software ought to be easy 360 degrees around especially in production. I’m not saying that the work designers and developers have to do to achieve this “Easy” goal is easy in itself. I have an unrequited love for the folks in engineering who possess the talent and perseverance in coding applications, but that doesn’t excuse a vendor from selling you a dream and then leaving you stranded to implement a nightmare all because there wasn’t enough emphasis on ease-of-use.

3. Application Performance. This one is near and dear to my heart and arguably the main reason for me to join AppDynamics. It takes me back to the challenging days and sleepless nights I endured while working on a massive global PDM implementation at LG Electronics jointly with Dassault Systemes. The year was 2008. Skynet hadn’t become self-aware yet. App Man was just A Man in the throes and woes of IT operations, and half way around the world over in Seoul, Korea I was managing juggling recurring performance issues on a weekly basis with our PMO having to answer to the beck and call of the LGE CIO. The project’s launch date had been delayed due to various complications with the implementation (that’s a whole other story). Any ideas what one of those might have entailed? If you guessed “performance”, congratulations! You’ve won! Download your free copy AppDynamics Lite.

Every week new customizations were being released from R&D back in the states, PS in Korea and SI’s sitting on the other side of the room. You could call it Agile development’s nemesis, frAgile development. The dynamic nature of our java-based environment only introduced more challenges to the performance team who were heads-down trying to reverse engineer someone else’s code and refactor it using APM tools that just didn’t provide us with the full visibility we needed to comprehensively profile and diagnose application performance issues (using JenniferSoft). In fact, one of the consultants on our team ended up creating his own profiler to expose these blind spots, but what we really needed was a next-generation APM tool that would visually map and connect the dots for us like the one below.

Then we ran into another stumbling block after we completed migrating legacy data to a new “production” environment. When the time came to retest the entire set of performance use cases in this new environment we experienced all kinds of performance regressions. Since everyone was collaborating so well with each other for over the past two years, we all cheerfully marched forward without any finger pointing as to what the root cause was. Ok, so it wasn’t that utopian. Fortunately, because of everyone’s undying commitment and personal sacrifices, the project went live successfully in mid 2010 with over 2,000 users visiting the system per day. In hindsight, we could have easily saved a month’s worth had we used a better tool thereby eliminating the usual suspects.

From that experience I’ve come to appreciate and understand how business-critical managing application performance is for any company. Now I am on a mission to spread the word of AppDynamics to help companies manage rapidly evolving, distributed environments.

Buckle up 2012, we’re just getting started.

Agile Development, App Man, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Ease-of-Use, HP, JenniferSoft, New Relic

Last week a performance engineer called Ben Bramley published a blog entitled “APM Market Disruptors – AppDynamics and New Relic“. The purpose of his article was to provide an overview of AppDynamics and New Relic, whilst also summarizing the key approaches each vendor/solution has taken to simplify and disrupt the APM marketplace.

Firstly, we’re thrilled to be recognized by a blogger, who in this case, had previous hands on experience with Application Performance Management (APM) products like OpTier, CA Wily, HP and dynaTrace. Secondly, whilst it was obviously good (and slightly nerving at times) to read our features and capabilities compared with another vendor (and the APM market in general), it was actually nice to see our freemium and SaaS based go-to-market strategy being recognized as well. I guess these things were actually the main reason why a blogger could access, compare and contrast two next generation APM solutions in the first place. It’s not like IBM, CA or Compuware would make their APM solution available to the masses for evaluation, let alone welcome an independent opinion.

You can read Ben’s blog article in full here.

App Man.

Update: HP does in fact offer their solution (HP Diagnostics v9) via trial, but you’ve got to download and install 4GB of their software.  In the time it takes to do this you could already be up and running with AppDynamics Lite.

APM Market Disruptors, AppDynamics vs New Relic, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Dynatrace, HP, IBM, New Relic, OpTier, Web Monitoring

AppDynamics has experienced significant growth over the past three years, here’s a quick summary of our key highlights.

Embed this image on your site:
<a href="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/2012/01/20/appdynamics-growth/" title="AppDynamics Growth - Not Bad for 3 Years"><br /> <img src="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/AppDynamics_growth_infographic2.png" alt="AppDynamics Growth in 2011" /></a><br /> <br/>Source: <a href="http://www.appdynamics.com" title="AppDynamics Application Performance Management Tools">AppDynamics: Application Monitoring Company</a><br/>

apm, APm SaaS, APMaaS, appdynamics, AppDynamics Growth, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, Business Transaction Management

When I joined AppDynamics less than a year ago, we were situated in a 6,000 sq ft “cozy” office on 2nd and Brannan. On my first day I was greeted with a MacBook Pro and was asked to find a spare desk amongst the boxes and carnage of a typical startup environment. To my left was a relentless engineering and UI team, and to my right was a fired up sales and marketing team, and a quietly confident Founder and CEO, Jyoti Bansal who made all of this happen. Across the office was a shiny gold bell mounted on the wall, which rang every time AppDynamics closed a new customer. In the last year I can honestly say that shiny bell hasn’t stopped ringing, and is the biggest adrenaline boost one can get while working.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, AppDynamics Funding, appdynamics lite, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware Dynatrace, Dynatrace, HP BAC, HP Diagnostics, IBM, Kleiner Perkins, New Relic

It’s been a great start to 2012 for us at AppDynamics. Last week, we were recognized by Forrester Research in their APM market overview, and at the end of 2011, Gartner included us in their report “APM Innovators: Driving APM Technology and Delivery Evolution” which was co-written by Will Capelli and Jonah Kowall.

According to Gartner’s report, APM is evolving into four key market requirements:

1. Complex and varied End Points

2. Cloud Services

3. Packaged Applications

4. Big Data

Read the Full Post…

APm SaaS, APMaaS, appdynamics, ATG, Big Data, Extrahop, Gartner APM, Gartner APM Innovators, Jonah Cowall, New Relic, Splunk, Will Capelli, Yantra

Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, JP Garbani, gives readers very pragmatic advice on the raison d’etre for APM.  Simply put, APM’s job is to:

1) Alert IT to application performance and availability issues before a full-scale outage occurs

2) Isolate or pinpoint the problem source

3) Provide deep-diagnostics to enable IT to determine the root cause

For several years now, JP Garbani has been on the forefront of proclaiming that modern APM solutions should enable IT organizations to manage apps not by gauging the heath of their servers or servlets, but instead by assessing what the customer or end-user cares about most – whether their Business Transaction completes quickly and doesn’t make them wait.  He states that this has become even more critical as applications have gotten more distributed and complex.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Forrester APM, Forrester APM Market Overview, Nastel, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Precise

In May last year we launched AppDynamics Lite 1.0, the first free application performance management (APM) solution to monitor and troubleshoot a production JVM. 18 Months and 50,000+ users later I’m pleased to announce version 2 of AppDynamics Lite is here and the innovation hasn’t stopped. In fact, I would say Lite 2.0 gives many legacy (or vintage) APM vendors a run for their money. Five years ago the standard for any APM solution was the ability to perform Byte Code Instrumentation for logging application response times along with some JMX metric collection to monitor JVM and container resource. Lite 2.0 does all this, albeit it’s limited to a single JVM, which is one more JVM than any other APM vendor will give you for free.

Here is an example of what AppDynamics Lite 2.0 looks like today when you monitor a single JVM.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, Application Performance Management, BTM, Free Monitoring, JBoss Monitoring, JConsole, JVM Monitoring, Tomcat Monitoring, VisualVM, Weblogic Monitoring, WebSphere Monitoring

Back in April this year, we announced new monitoring support for NoSQL tecnhnologies like Cassandra and Memcached which was received really well by our customers. Due to further demand we’ve seen over the past few months from prospects and customers we’ve officially added MongoDB to our platform support, thus extending our coverage of NoSQL technologies.

For those not familiar with MongoDB, here’s how it differs from the traditional relational database just so you know what data and context AppDynamics provides for monitoring MongoDB applications:

Read the Full Post…

apm, Application Performance Management, BSON, BSON Query Performance, Business Transactions, MongoDB, MongoDB Monitoring, MongoDB Performance