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.

Read the Full Post…

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

Since we launched our Managed Service Provider program late last year, we’ve signed up many MSPs that were interested in adding Application Performance Management-as-a-Service (APMaaS) to their service catalogs.  Wouldn’t you be excited to add a service that’s easy to manage but more importantly easy to sell to your existing customer base?

Service providers like Scicom definitely were (check out the case study), because they are being held responsible for the performance of their customer’s complex, distributed applications, but oftentimes don’t have visibility inside the actual application.  That’s like being asked to officiate an NFL game with your eyes closed.

The sad truth is that many MSPs still think that high visibility in app environments equates to high configuration, high cost, and high overhead.

Thankfully this is 2013.  People send emails instead of snail mail, play Call of Duty instead of Pac-Man, listen to Pandora instead of cassettes, and can have high visibility in app environments with low configuration, low cost, and low overhead with AppDynamics.

Not only do we have a great APM service to help MSPs increase their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), we make it extremely easy for them to deploy this service in their own environments, which, to be candid, is half the battle.  MSPs can’t spend countless hours deploying a new service.  It takes focus and attention away from their core business, which in turn could endanger the SLAs they have with their customers.  Plus, it’s just really annoying.

Introducing: APMaaS in a Box

Here at AppDynamics, we take pride in delivering value quickly.  Most of our customers go from nothing to full-fledged production performance monitoring across their entire environment in a matter of hours in both on-premise and SaaS deployments.  MSPs are now leveraging that same rapid SaaS deployment model in their own environments with something that we like to call ‘APMaaS in a Box’.

At a high level, APMaaS in a Box is large cardboard box with air holes and a fragile sticker wherein we pack a support engineer, a few management servers, an instruction manual, and a return label…just kidding…sorry, couldn’t resist.

Simply put, APMaaS in a Box is a set of files and scripts that allows MSPs to provision multi-tenant controllers in their own data center or private cloud and provision AppDynamics licenses for customers themselves…basically it’s the ultimate turnkey APMaaS.

By utilizing AppDynamics’ APMaaS in a Box, MSPs across the world are leveraging our quick deployment, self-service license provisioning, and flexibility in the way we do business to differentiate themselves and gain net new revenue.

Quick Deployment

Within 6 hours, MSPs like NTT Europe who use our APMaaS in a Box capabilities will have all the pieces they need in place to start monitoring the performance of their customer’s apps.  Now that’s some rapid time to value!

Self-Service License Provisioning

MSPs can provision licenses directly through the AppDynamics partner portal.  This gives you complete control over who gets licenses and makes it very easy to manage this process across your customer base.

Flexibility

A MSP can get started on a month-to-month basis with no commitment.  Only paying for what you sell eliminates the cost of shelfware.  MSPs can also sell AppDynamics however they would like to position it and can float licenses across customers.  NTT Europe uses a 3-tier service offering so customers can pick and choose the APM services they’d like to pay for.  Feel free to get creative when packaging this service for customers!

Conclusion

As more and more MSPs move up the stack from infrastructure management to monitoring the performance of their customer’s distributed applications, choosing an APM partner that understands the Managed Services business is of utmost importance.  AppDynamics’ APMaaS in a box capabilities align well with internal MSP infrastructures, and our pricing model aligns with the business needs of Managed Service Providers – we’re a perfect fit.

MSPs who continue to evolve their service offerings to keep pace with customer demands will be well positioned to reap the benefits and future revenue that comes along with staying ahead of the market.  To paraphrase The Great One, MSPs need to “skate where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”  I encourage all you MSPs out there to contact us today to see how we can help you skate ahead of the curve and take advantage of the growing APM market with our easy to use, easy to deploy APMaaS in a Box.  If you don’t, your competition will…

apm, APMaaS, appdynamics, application monitoring, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, Business Transaction Management, Managed Service Providers, MSP, MSPs, NTT Europe, Production Monitoring, Root Cause Analysis, Service Provider

It’s been a while since I last blogged, almost entirely because AppDynamics is growing faster than I ever expected. For example, last week we had our sales kickoff for 2013 and we literally filled the Clift hotel in San Francisco. To say the least, that’s a very different experience than filling a conference room with 35 people back in 2011!

Possibly my favorite part of the day was the first part–the CIO from one of our major retail customers addressed the sales team and spoke about how AppDynamics has become integral to his business and has truly become a strategic partner. He looked at our team straight in the eyes and said, “You guys belong in the CIO’s office.” Talk about an epic, special moment. When a CIO says that, you sit up, listen, and realize you’re well beyond byte code instrumentation, asynchronous transactions, and garbage collection.

You see, this CIO didn’t have a technical background–and he was perfectly upfront about that–yet he did “get” how AppDynamics has helped him solve some of the most complex problems across his business and partners. He was also a super competitive guy who wanted to crush his competitors, and he saw AppDynamics as a clear competitive advantage that helped him do just that.

This brings me to the philosophy behind everything we do at AppDynamics: simply put, we’re laser-focused on solving real-life problems for customers. We deliver solutions to problems rather than deliver technology, abbreviations, or buzz words like Big Data, Cloud, BTM, BDA, ALM, BPM, BCI, Packet Inspective, Predictive Analytics or Log Analytics. Technology is just a means to solve problems; what customers really care about is whether you can take away their pain.

We’re in the Application Performance Monitoring market. That’s what we do, that’s what we know, that’s what we breathe, and that’s what we’re great at – we help customers manage the performance and availability of their applications in production. Simple.

The problems we solve are pretty straightforward:

- Tell me if there is a performance or availability issue with my application as quickly as possible

- Help me troubleshoot where the problem is as quickly as possible

- Help me fix the problem as quickly as possible

- Help me avoid the problem in future

- AND help me do all this as easily as possible, with minimal configuration, maintenance, and effort (and without breaking the bank)

We do all the above better than anyone else right now, and we do it in some of the largest, complex, distributed application environments in the world. And the reason we do just that is because our stuff works. We don’t sell slideware, we don’t oversell, and we don’t promise the world. Rather, we just let our solution do the talking, because that’s what customers want.

The biggest problem we face is no one believes us after the pain they’ve gone through owning/evaluating the first generation of APM vendors. Customers these days don’t want an army of sales people and consultants turning up to sell and configure their solution; they just want the product to what it’s advertised to do. Can you imagine if you bought an Apple laptop and a consultant turned up at your door and configured it in front of you while you waited?

Yep, our solution has a lot of technology and not-so-secret sauce like deep diagnostics, distributed transaction tracing, application discovery & mapping, behavioural learning, and dynamic baselining – but we don’t sell those things because individually they solve nothing for customers. Yet, when you put them all together, you start to deliver something that can help customers solve real pain in their business. For example, an end user complained that they couldn’t login to the application – we monitor that transaction, learn its normal performance, flag its abnormal deviation, and provide diagnostics of how that transaction executed across and inside every tier within the application infrastructure. We do all of that in production, yet we’re so lightweight that you don’t even know we’re there. Customers typically find the root cause of business impact in 5 to 15 minutes with AppDynamics–compared to hours using traditional approaches.

This is one of the key reasons why we’re winning the trust and attention of CIOs around the world. We help customers solve problems–that’s all we do–but we do it well and without the hype.

Make no mistake: we’re laser-focused on solving customer problems and that is why AppDynamics is growing and I have no time to write blogs.

Appman.

appdynamics, AppDynamics Success