Some companies talk about monitoring their end user experience and other companies take the bull by the horns and get it done. For those who have successfully implemented EUM (RUM, EUEM, or whatever your favorite acronym is) the technology is rewarding for both the company and the end user alike. I recently had the opportunity to discuss AppDynamics EUM with one of our customers and the information shared with me was exciting and gratifying.

The Environment

ManpowerGroup monitors their intranet and internet applications with AppDynamics. These applications are used for internal operations as well as customer facing websites; in support of their global business and accessed from around the word, 24×7. We’re talking about business critical, revenue generating applications!

I asked Fred Graichen, Manager of Enterprise Application Support, why he thought ManpowerGroup needed EUM.

“One of the key components for EUM is to shed light on what is happening in the “last mile”. Our business involves supporting branch locations. Having an EUM tool allows us to compare performance across all of our branches. This also helps us determine whether any performance issues are localized. Having the insight into the difference in performance by location allows us to make more targeted investments in local hardware and network infrastructure.”

Meaningful Results

Turning on a monitoring tool doesn’t mean you’ll automagically get the results you want. You also need to make sure your tool is integrated with your people, processes, and technologies. That’s exactly what ManpowerGroup has done with AppDynamics EUM. They have alerts based upon EUM metrics that get routed to the proper people. They are then able to correlate the EUM information with data from other (Network) monitoring tools in their root cause analysis. Below is an EUM screen shot from ManpowerGroup’s environment.

By implementing AppDynamics EUM, ManpowerGroup has been able to:

• Identify locations that are experiencing the worst performance.
• Successfully illustrate the difference in performance globally as well. (This is key when studying the impact of latency etc. on an application that is being accessed from other countries but are located in a central datacenter.)
• Quickly identify when a certain location is seeing performance issues and correlate that with data from other monitoring solutions.

But what does all of this mean to the business? It means that ManpowerGroup has been able to find and resolve problems faster for their customers and employees. Faster application response time combined with happier customers and more productive employees all contribute to a healthier bottom line for ManpowerGroup.

ManpowerGroup is using AppDynamics EUM to bring a higher level of performance to it’s employees, customers, and shareholders. Sign up for a free trial today and begin your journey to a healthier bottom line.

AppDynamics EUM, End User Monitoring, EUM, Real User Monitoring, RUM

Today AppDynamics announced that we’ve secured a $50 million Series D funding led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). It is a milestone event for our company and I thought I’d take a moment to answer two key questions: Why another funding round, and why right now?

The first answer is that we need the money to scale to meet the demand for our product in the marketplace. The demand for our product and the growth of our company has far outpaced even our most aggressive growth projections. When I founded AppDynamics in 2008, my goal was simple: to make applications easier for ops and dev to manage by telling them relevant, actionable information about what’s going on at the code level and how that ties back to the business and the end users. My approach with AppDynamics was to build a scalable and intelligent product capable of understanding complex applications and automatically instrumenting, baselining and analyzing them. The intelligence of the product has been met with tremendous success among the owners of large, distributed applications, as our customers will attest – they’ve given our product a Net Promoter Score (NPS^®) of 81, which is outstanding for enterprise software (the average NPS for software companies was 41 in 2012).

With our customers’ support, we’ve been able to soar past our revenue goals for the last two years running, allowing us to double our employee count and begin to expand internationally. We are now managing 51 Billion transactions every day across our customer base, and our customers include some of the most popular (and some of the most complex) apps in the world – Netflix, Orbitz, Expedia, Tivo, Overstock.com, Fox News, Staples, Time Warner Cable, Intuit, and Priceline.com–just to name a few.

After much consideration, the executive team and I have decided to continue on this trajectory and scale to meet demand by securing a growth round of financing. We’ll use this money to reinvest in engineering, scale sales and marketing, and expand our presence overseas, especially in Europe and Asia. That’s the first answer to the why we got the funding: we need the money to scale to meet demand.

The second answer is that we have a long-term vision for our product and our company that this money will help us to realize. Today’s world is run on software (or as Marc Andreesen put it, “software is eating the world”). Whether you’re buying concert tickets, booking a flight, buying clothes or saving for retirement, almost everything you do is handled by software. That means that everything we do in our life these days is supported by millions of lines of code, not all of which is perfect. Our vision is to make this software run better by instrumenting, analyzing, and optimizing every single line of code, and giving everyone from developers to CEOs to consumers insight into the software that forms the foundation of the modern world. We are already helping many of these applications; whether you are watching movies online, or booking flights, or filing insurance claims, or filing tax returns, or buying concert tickets, our software is helping people to get the best experience. But we have many many more applications to help.

To fulfill this mission, we have an aggressive product roadmap that demands resources both from Research & Development and the business side of our company. We need to invest in order to help us realize this vision of making the software of the world run better.

For now, I would like to thank our customers for helping us achieve this milestone as a company. We’re very grateful for the continued support of thousands of application support teams that have put their trust in us – some of them when we were still an unknown quantity. To them, we give our sincere thanks. For those of you who are just encountering us for the first time, welcome. We have an exciting road ahead of us, and we hope you’ll join us on the journey.

AppDynamics Funding, IVP, Kleiner Perkins

Here at AppDynamics we’re very proud of how easy our solution is to deploy and maintain. We also tout the fact that in many cases there is no configuration required to gain the insight needed to solve complex application problems. All of this is absolutely true, but does it mean that AppDynamics doesn’t have enough functionality to support complex deployments that make little to no use of common frameworks? Absolutely not! But don’t take our word for it, see for yourself in this presentation by Orbitz (Geoff Kramer and Nick Jasieniecki) at one of our Chicago User Group meetings. In case you don’t know what Orbitz does I think this quote from Geoff Kramer sums it up quite well… “Orbitz unlocks the joy of travel for our customers. You can’t do that if you are having site problems.”

If you don’t have 50 minutes to spare right now I will summarize the videos key points in this blog post.

Read the Full Post…

Business Metrics, Business Transactions, Information Points, Production APM, Test In Production

I received a rather nice email last night from one of our customers Fox News:

Hey Appman – we just had a KICK ASS night with elections coverage, and just so you’d know, we had AppDynamics to monitor our site and it helped us avoid a number of pitfalls…

Just thought you’d like to know.

Here is what our contact at Fox News told us, showing us how AppDynamics was used to proactively manage the performance and availability of their flagship media website:

“This first screen shot shows you the whole day, providing a request histogram view of application throughput SLA (vertical bars) and performance (blue line).”

“Around 4PM, we started having issues as shown by the blue line spikes (shown above), and then I looked around.

One of the things I found was that a feed (HTTP call) we were pulling from our video site was timing out.”

“That was also evident via another call through our API.“

“As if that wasn’t enough, we found out that we had business transactions calling back to http://pipes.yahoo.com, which we weren’t even supposed to be using. A developer told me that it was in the old version, not in the new one. But after showing him it in AppDynamics, they removed it (that helped quite a bit).”

“If you notice as well with the graphs from 7-11PM onwards, response time began to increase, so we kept an eye on the servers and started to see an increase in our error rate.”

“One thing we did notice was that the tomcats were throwing an error exception “not enough space left on device,” which we traced to the system running out of inodes. To fix that we had to end up deleting some old cache files, and after that the error mostly went away.”

“It was a wild night for sure, but AppDynamics helped us keep things in check!”

If you want to try AppDynamics, you can download our free version AppDynamics Lite or take a free 30-day trial of AppDynamics Pro.

Appman.

appdynamics, application monitoring, Detecting Bottlenecks, Fox News, Production Bottlenecks, Production Monitoring, Slow API Calls