In our last post, we talked about the importance of business transactions for applications in the cloud. They’re also crucial for managing highly distributed applications. But what is a business transaction?
Consider a business transaction to be a user-generated action within your system. The best practice for determining the performance of your application isn’t to measure CPU usage, but to track the flow of a transaction that your customer, the end user, has requested.

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APM Thought Leadership, application monitoring, business transaction

A new version of AppDynamics Lite is available for download. One thing that makes AppDynamics unique is our 10-30 promise.  Users should be able to self-install Lite in 10 minutes and start getting value in 30.  We do this by auto-discovering your application dependencies and automatically instrumenting the app, with no manual code changes.

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apm, APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics lite

At AppDynamics, we focus on listening to our customers and their needs.  We’ve also noticed their surprise and delight when they see our technology in action and realize they can defy the conventional wisdom of how Application Management can work.

Over the last year, we’ve collected a short-list of key questions that APM buyers should ask to ensure they get the solution that best fits their needs.  For example, some products like profilers are best suited for development environments, but are ill-suited for production.  The same distinction is true of APM products.

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apm, APM Thought Leadership

It’s 2011, and AppDynamics got what we wanted as a holiday gift—15,000 downloads of our free java troubleshooting tool, AppDynamics Lite.

To commemorate the 15,000^th downloader, we emailed all of our Lite users and offered to send one of our patented “I Take No Crap From My App” T-shirts in exchange for a public screenshot of their installation in action.

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APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics lite, application monitoring

The Cloud gets all the hype.  But according to the recent survey conducted by AppDynamics, getting to the Cloud is still taking a back seat to the need to finish application virtualization.

We recently surveyed a group of professionals directly responsible for the oversight of application performance, specifically in Java and/or .NET environments.  Based on the answers from over 140 respondents, more respondents stated a preference for initiating virtualization projects over moving apps to the cloud.

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apm, APM Thought Leadership, cloud, survey, virtualization

Attendees of the 2010 Gartner Data Center Conference exhibited a lot of interest around Application Performance Management, as evidenced by the packed room where Gartner analyst Donna Scott discussed application availability in her session “Uptime All the Time.”

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APM Thought Leadership, application monitoring, DevOps

San Francisco’s QCon was expecting a smaller crowd, but ended up bursting at the seams: the event sold out weeks ahead of time and in many sessions it was standing room only.

Targeted at architects and operations folks as much as developers, QCon was heavy on the hot topics of the day: SOA, agile, and DevOps. But if there was a consistent trend throughout the three days, it was “No more theory. Show us the practice.”

At Jesper Boeg’s talk for example—“Raising the Bar: Using Kanban and Lean to Super Optimize Your Agile Implementation”—the talk was peppered with some good sound bites (“If it hurts, do it more often and bring the pain forward”). But it also stressed the meat: Boeg demonstrated a “deployment pipeline” that represented an automated implementation of the build, deploy, test, and release process—a way to find and eliminate bottlenecks in agile delivery.

Similarly, John Allspaw started high in his talk—sharing his ideas on the areas of ownership and specialization between Ops and Dev, a typical DevOps presentation—but backs up the theory with code-level discussions of how logging, metrics, and monitoring works at Etsy.  (His blog entry on the subject and complete Qcon slides can be found on his blog, Kitchen Soap.)

Adrian Cockroft, who is leading a trailblazing public cloud deployment of production-level applications at Netflix, also wrapped theory around juicy substance. He “showed the code” and the screenshots of his company’s app scaling and monitoring tools (you can find his complete slide presentation here).

Not everyone took the time to drill down, though. Tweets from QCon attendees showed that the natives got restless in talks that stayed too high level:

“OK, just because you can draw a block diagram out of something doesn’t mean it makes sense.”

“Ok, we get it. Your company is very interesting, now get to the nerd stuff.”

“These sessions are high-level narratives. Show me the code, guys! Devil’s in the details.”

At the same time, they would shower plaudits and congratulations on speakers who gave them what they wanted: something new to learn.

When the Twitter stream started to compare QCon’s activities with an event happening concurrently in the city, Cloud Expo, the nature of the attendees was draw into sharp relief:

“At #cloudexpo people used laptops during sessions to check email… At #qconsf they are writing code.”

When it comes to agile, SOA, DevOps, and other problems of the day, people are ready for answers.

APM Thought Leadership, cloud computing, developers, DevOps, IT operations

AppDynamics is founded on a set of deeply held beliefs regarding our industry and how it’s changed over the last several years.  But it’s never good to let deeply held beliefs stay unchallenged.  So every now and then, we do a reality check.

Our most recent reality check was during our webinar presentation of AppDynamics 3.0. We attracted hundreds of IT ops and dev professionals who wanted to learn both about our solution as well as the specific features of our new release—so we took the opportunity to poll them and ask them a few questions. First, we asked if they operated in a SOA environment:

AppDynamics believes that applications are increasingly moving to SOA, turning monolithic web architectures from the early 2000s into obsolete antiques.  As you can see, that belief was confirmed; the vast majority of our webinar attendees have already entered that world.

Then we asked if they followed an agile development approach:

Again, the vast majority of attendees have embraced agile—in fact, nearly 50% release new features or capabilities at least monthly!  Only 8% report that they follow the traditional, waterfall approach to development. With those kinds of tumultuous deadlines, AppDynamics remains impressed that these hardy souls were actually able to take enough time out of their schedule to watch our presentation.

Finally, we wanted to know the punch line: what’s the effect of all this change on their ability to manage application performance?

Over half were really feeling the crunch, and only a scant few had escaped unscathed.

It’s not that AppDynamics enjoys the pain of others. (We don’t. Really.)  But having our fundamental beliefs confirmed—that the world of applications has changed, and application management solutions need to change with them—simply lets us know that we exist for the right reasons.

Take the example of one of our most recent customers, TiVo.  Operating in a highly distributed environment, TiVo has hundreds of individual Java and proprietary applications, designed to work together to deliver service to its customers.

“We used to spend hours troubleshooting issues,” Richard Rothschild, Senior Director of IT, told us.  “If a service was running slowly and we didn’t know the cause, finding that root cause was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

He continued, “We used to spend up to 6 hours on root cause. AppDynamics brought that time down to ten minutes.  We’ve already seen a big improvement in the reliability and uptime of our services—anything that simplifies our job in this complex environment makes us feel much more confident about taking on new business projects.”

It’s complicated out there, and with the advent of cloud and virtual environments, it’s not getting any easier. But we went into this business in order to simplify application performance management and support application teams in their quest for both performance and availability.  So far, it looks like we chose the right reasons to exist.

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics, cloud computing, IT operations, SOA

Here’s a guest blog from one of AppDynamics’ international partners, Stefan Zoltai from sysPerform. Stefan wanted to write about how he used AppDynamics to solve a performance problem for a major telecom company in Switzerland—and we said, sure!  Take it away, Stefan…

I’d like to talk about how we used AppDynamics for a major production troubleshooting exercise—and how AppDynamics passed with flying colors.

Swisscom is the leading telecommunications company in Switzerland with about 5.7 million mobile customers and 1.8 million broadband connections. Swisscom is present on the Swiss market with a full portfolio of wireless, wire- and IP-based data and voice-based communication services.

Swisscom’s (Internet) Messaging had engaged sysPerform to assist with the analysis of their Tomcat 6 / Java 1.6 based WebMail application. WebMail has been under scrutiny for about a year now—ever since it manifested both performance and stability problems. Prior analysis efforts, conducted with a number of available tools, did not lead to the determination of the actual root cause(s) since the aforementioned problems only occurred in production under load and could not be reproduced in other environments. WebMail is rated at a throughput of 300 tx/sec.

We realized immediately that without a deep, detailed view into the application’s runtime, in production and under load, we would not be able to determine the actual root cause.

To analyze the application, we selected AppDynamics’ application performance management solution.  Since this solution has been developed specifically for high throughput, distributed production environments, we were able to obtain a high-level overview of the application as well as conduct a deep root cause analysis down to code-level execution without generating measurable overhead. Again, we did all of this at 300 transactions per second of throughput.

Thanks to AppDynamics’ ability to create a dynamic baseline of application performance, we were able to isolate the major bottlenecks on the first day and discuss a solution with the developers at Swisscom.  We were able to quickly learn the application’s performance and stability characteristics — and after only 5 days of development, we deployed a specific, major fix to address the main issue and massively improve performance.  At the moment, we are continuing our analysis efforts since stability and performance are the focus of an ongoing quality process.

[UPDATE: For Swisscom's perspective on the use of AppDynamics, check out Mika Borner's blog]

This example clearly demonstrates that operating a modern, distributed application without an adequate monitoring solution is effectively the same as “flying blind.” 60%-80% of all performance problems are caused by the application itself, and need to be analyzed from the inside out. We can confirm these numbers from many of other engagements with similar customers. External causes like hardware or network issues have become increasingly rare; it’s the problems deep inside the application that truly matter.

Intelligent application performance management however is not a means to itself, but must be evaluated in terms of economical considerations as well. Our experience indicates that an APM solution shows an ROI within just a few months. Among the reasons for such a quick ROI is the aforementioned extremely fast root cause analysis.

If you’re reading this in Switzerland, feel free to contact me with questions!

– Stefan Zoltai, Founder, SysPerform GmbH

Email: sz@sysperform.ch

Twitter: http://twitter.com/SysPerform

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics, application monitoring, business transaction, dynamic baselines

Memory, Memory, Memory…

Memory is a critical part of Java, in particular, the management of memory. As a developer, memory management is not something you want to be doing on a regular basis, nor is it something you want to do manually. One of the great benefits of Java is its ability to take care of the memory model for you. When objects aren’t in use, Java helps you out by doing the clean up.

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APM Thought Leadership, application development, application monitoring, Java, memory leaks, memory thrash