Today AppDynamics announced integration with PagerDuty, a SaaS-based provider of IT alerting and incident management software that is changing the way IT teams are notified, and how they manage incidents in their mission-critical applications.  By combining AppDynamics’ granular visibility of applications with PagerDuty’s reliable alerting capabilities, customers can make sure the right people are proactively notified when business impact occurs, so IT teams can get their apps back up and running as quickly as possible.

You’ll need a PagerDuty and AppDynamics license to get started – if you don’t already have one, you can sign up for free trials of PagerDuty and AppDynamics online.  Once you complete this simple installation, you’ll start receiving incidents in PagerDuty created by AppDynamics out-of-the-box policies.

Alert Storm, Alert Storming, Alerts, apm, APM Integration, APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics, AppDynamics Pro, application, Application Complexity, application monitoring, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, incident management, integration, pagerduty, Production Monitoring

It’s been about 12 years since I last scripted in PHP. I pretty much paid my way through college building PHP websites for small companies that wanted a web presence. Back then PHP was the perfect choice, because nearly all the internet service providers had PHP support for free if you registered domain names with them. Java and .NET wasn’t an option for a poor smelly student like me, so I just wrote standard HTML with embedded scriplets of PHP code and bingo–I had dynamic web pages.

Today, 244 million websites run on PHP which is almost 75% of the web. That’s a pretty scary statistic. If only I’d kept coding PHP back when I was 21, I’d be a billionaire by now! PHP is a pretty good example of how open-source technology can go viral and infect millions of developers and organizations world-wide.

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apm, APM Thought Leadership, App Man, appdynamics, AppDynamics Pro, application monitoring, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, Appman, Enterprise APM, php, Production Monitoring

When application issues land on the front page of the news you know it’s no longer just an IT problem. Application performance and availability is a key element of your organization’s brand, especially if a substantial percentage or the entire business is done online. The interesting thing about “brand value” is that it’s difficult to quantify and measure; yet everyone knows it carries tremendous weight for the organization. While there’s a constellation of elements that make up a brand such as design, quality and other key elements such as customer support, application service quality i.e. performance should be included in that equation. Let me explain.

 When I think of a company like Google, besides being “innovative” a few other words that come to mind are, “fast” and “reliable”. Now let’s take a trip down memory lane for a moment. Remember the social networking site Friendster? For those of you who aren’t unfamiliar with the pre-Facebook era, Friendster is arguably the godfather of social networking that became wildly popular back in 2002. At first glance my initial opinion of Friendster was “very cool” and “social”, and I’m sure just about everyone else who was an avid user of it shared similar sentiments.That is of course until their users began noticing a massive slow down in the site’s performance and being completely unavailable at times.

I vividly remember when I couldn’t even login at one point because their servers were completely overloaded. It didn’t take long before the perception of Friendster’s brand turned from “very cool” to a frustrating “too slow”. Some claim that this is one of the major reasons for MySpace to steal away a sizable chunk of their users who were abandoning the site in droves (fortunately, they’ve reinvented themselves and are quite popular now in Asia).

Back then, application performance problems may not have ended up on the front page of the news, but with viral effects of social media and the increasing number of people staying connected online due to mobile accessibility, don’t expect to be able to simply sweep these problems under the rug.

Consider the following stories the last few weeks:

• RBS IT Fallout leaves its customers stranded without access to their bank accounts.
• Salesforce.com hit with outage due to failure of a storage tier.
• And then, the Amazon EC2 outage.

Customers can be pretty fickle and unforgiving in today’s highly competitive environment. They expect your application service levels to be topnotch around the clock. One major outage or remarkable slowdown during the year might be permissible, but if this becomes more of the rule rather than the exception, don’t be surprised if your customers’ begin to associate your brand with an unfriendly, negative term.

Granted, not all of these issues are going to be 100% avoidable due to unpredictable natural disasters as proven by the recent Amazon EC2 outage. However, my point here is that application performance and availability should be given some serious TLC since it will probably be under increasing scrutiny from senior management. So before it appears on their radar, why not be vigilant about maintaining optimal application service levels before it hits the front page of the news or becomes an unfavorable trending topic on Twitter?

apm, APM Thought Leadership, application monitoring, Brand, Cost of application performance management, High Availability

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