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

One of my colleagues this week was consolidating the results from our recent Application Performance Management survey, and one interesting finding was that 40% of customers have at least one release cycle a month. Out of those respondents, one third experience a Severity-1 incident each month as well. That’s a pretty compelling pair of statistics, and they might explain the continued frustration and conflict between development and operations teams. It’s also perhaps the reason why this DevOps underground movement can no longer be ignored (even by Gartner). There is no doubt development organizations have become agile, but does deploying this frequent change make the business more or less agile? For example, if one in three releases creates a Severity-1 incident, then surely agile development becomes a risk to the business. We’re at the point where Operations either has to start managing change better or simply restrict the amount of change that can occur.

So why are Sev 1 incidents so common? Based on my experiences and customer interaction, I’d strongly argue that testing in development isn’t enough. At the very least, it’s certainly not an insurance policy for deploying an application in production. When a Formula 1 team designs a car in a wind tunnel and tests it on a simulator pre-season, they don’t assume that the performance they see in test will mirror the results they see in a race. Yet, that is pretty much what happens today in the application development lifecycle. Development teams build and test their apps in pre-production before handing it off to operations for deployment in production, and they assume everything will work just fine. This is probably the worst assumption IT has made over the last decade, because development and production environments differ significantly. It’s also a lame excuse for any development team to use when a production issue occurs: “Well it ran fine in test so you must have deployed it wrong.” Yes people make mistakes occasionally, but if one in every three releases has an issue, deployment error may not be the sole reason. If development never get to see how their baby runs in production, they’ll never learn how to build robust, scalable, and high-performance applications.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, application monitoring, CloudTest, HP LoadRunner, Load Runner, Load Testing, Production Monitoring, Production Testing, SOASTA

On Wednesday I delivered a keynote at WJAX in Munich. Everything went really well, but I was a little shocked at the response I got when I asked the audience “How many of you monitor the performance of your apps in production?” As I scanned the audience, I counted 9 out of ~950 developers had put their hands up, meaning about 1% had visibility of how their applications actually performed in production. I know what you’re thinking: “But isn’t application performance in production the responsibility of Operations?”  Well, it is and it isn’t. Most organizations think that when an application has an issue, it’s related to the infrastructure it runs on. That’s like saying when a car crashes, it’s because a part failed on the car whereas in actual fact most accidents are caused by the driver. Yes, hardware fails occasionally, but application logic and configuration drives how infrastructure resource is used, which is why most issues today occur when new code is deployed in production.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, AppDynamics Pro, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, MTTR, Performance Bottlenecks, Production Monitoring, Slow Application, WJAX

What happens when mission critical Java applications slow down or keep crashing in production? The vast majority of IT Operations (Ops) today bury their heads in log files. Why? because thats what they’ve been doing since IBM invented the mainframe. Diving into the weeds feels good, everyone feels productive looking at log entries, hoping that one will eventually explain the unexplainable. IT Ops may also look at system and network metrics which tell them how server resource and network bandwidth is being consumed. Again, looking at lots of metrics feels good but what is causing those server and network metrics to change in the first place? Answer: the application.

IT Ops monitor the infrastructure that applications run on, but they lack visibility of how applications actually work and utilize the infrastructure. To get this visibility, Ops must monitor the application run-time. A quick way to get started is to use the free tools that come with the application run-time. In the case of Java applications, both JConsole and VisualVM ship with the standard SDK and have proved popular choices for monitoring Java applications. When we built AppDynamics Lite we felt their was a void of free application monitoring solutions for IT Ops, the market had plenty of tools aimed at developers but many were just too verbose and intrusive for IT Ops to use in production. If we take a look at how JConsole, VisualVM and AppDynamics Lite compare, we’ll see just how different free application monitoring solutions can be.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics lite, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, Free application monitoring, Java Monitoring, JConsole, JVM, JVM Monitoring, Oracle, Oracle Java Monitoring, VisualVM

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

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.

Read the Full Post…

apm, APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics lite

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.

Read the Full Post…

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics lite, application monitoring

It’s a big day for us here at AppDynamics as we mark (and pass!) the 5000th download of AppDynamics Lite! Released just a few months ago, AppDynamics Lite is our free APM tool for troubleshooting Java performance in production.  We hear every day from companies who have deployed Lite in production environments and are using it to solve real problems.  That’s why we built it, and it’s very rewarding to hear about IT Operations professionals and developers getting real value.

This conversation represents another goal of ours: removing the friction that typically exists between software companies and evaluators. With Lite, companies can download it whenever they want and put it immediately into action.  No waiting, no negotiating…just instant access.  This strategy works for us because, as a startup, we believe that if someone becomes familiar with our solution, they’ll see that it’s considerably better than the legacy offerings on the market.

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, application monitoring, cloud computing, developers, DevOps

Over the past few days, we’ve shot past 2001 downloads of our free java performance tool, AppDynamics Lite. What does that mean? Well, first and foremost, it’s an excuse to post a picture of the monolith from the movie 2001:

Equally as important, perhaps, is that the milestone of 2K downloads in only a matter of weeks indicates just how much the market wanted a tool like AppDynamics Lite. We’re finding that our users are resonating with its simple message: “the first java performance tool designed for production.” There are profilers aplenty, but until now there’s been nothing that can work in production–digging down into code-level details–without creating excessive overhead.

Who are these users? They represent quite a range. We’ve seen Fortune 500 companies, up-and-coming SaaS shops, mid-sized companies, students, consultants…and, of course, our competitors.

We’re continuing to refine and improve the tool based on user feedback in our forums, so it’s worth noting that the version of AppDynamics Lite now available for download is a new version. It includes an improved ability to take diagnostic snapshots of performance problems, as well as a feature that alerts the user when new updates and fixes are available.

AppDynamics Lite will always run in tandem with our commercial product. It will never carry a price tag, and we will continue to update and refine it. It’s a great way to introduce new users to the way we see the world of application performance management.

Download the new version of AppDynamics Lite here.

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics lite