TAG | Application Performance Management
Welcome, let’s start with a quick introduction of who you are and what your role is at PagerDuty.
My name is Alex, I’m PagerDuty’s CEO and co-founder.
And what beer will you be drinking tonight?
Guinness! It’s the office favorite.
What problems does your solution or service solve for customers?
PagerDuty provides centralized, highly-targeted alerting, escalation, and incident management. We integrate with the monitoring systems you have in place to provide a single place to manage all of your alerting. When things go down, we wake you up.
What types of technology trends are you seeing within your customer base?
We have a great mix of customers, from large enterprises (we have 15 of the Fortune 100 as customers), to mid-size companies like Splunk, Citrix, and Box, to two-person startups, which gives us an interesting perspective. The most obvious trend that we’re seeing is companies looking to automate the notification piece of ‘monitoring and alerting’ right off the bat. With IaaS providers like Rackspace and AWS, the need to do a costly NOC build-out has been almost entirely eliminated. Folks who do have a NOC in place are looking to automate what they can, while allowing on-site engineers to tackle the problems they’re best equipped to solve.
What application performance pain and challenges do you typically see within customer accounts?
All our customers have mission-critical infrastructure in place, and for many of them, slow applications directly equate to lost revenue. When company performance depends on applications being available and responsive, having an APM solution deployed isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.
Why does partnering with AppDynamics make good sense?
AppDynamics is the enterprise APM solution, and PagerDuty is the enterprise alerting solution. There couldn’t be a more natural fit – when AppDynamics detects an issue, PagerDuty wakes you up.
What’s your favorite thing about AppDynamics?
The ROI! We’re big believers in actively monitoring revenue-critical production applications. Anything you can deploy and see a 2x, 4x, 10x return, quickly, that’s pretty great in my book.
How can someone find out more about PagerDuty?
Just signup for a free trial at pagerduty.com. Or just shoot us an email at sales@pagerduty.com and a member of our sales staff will reach out to setup a demo.
Which software companies inspire you?
B2B companies that make something people want and that solves a clear need. We like companies that can tackle hair on fire problems. AppDynamics, obviously, and Splunk come to mind.
Who is your favorite super hero and why?
Spiderman. He’s powerful yet flawed – a real human super hero.
Alert Storming, Alerts, App Man, application monitoring, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, Appman, Appman Beers, Beers, Guinness, incident management, pagerduty, startups, technology trends
Intelligent Alerting for Complex Applications – PagerDuty & AppDynamics
Posted by Marcus | Apr, 16, 2013 | In APM Best Practice, APM Thought Leadership, News
1 Comment
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.
Once an incident is filed it will have the following list view:
When the ‘Details’ link is clicked, you’ll see the details for this particular incident including the Incident Log:
If you are interested in learning more about the event itself, simply click ‘View message’ and all of the AppDynamics event details are displayed showing which policy was breached, violation value, severity, etc. :
Let’s walk through some examples of how our customers are using this integration today.
Say Goodbye to Irrelevant Notifications
Is your work email address included in some sort of group email alias at work and you get several, maybe even dozens, of notifications a day that aren’t particularly relevant to your responsibilities or are intended for other people on your team? I know I do. Imagine a world where your team only receives messages when the notifications have to do with their individual role and only get sent to people that are actually on call. With AppDynamics & PagerDuty you can now build in alerting logic that routes specific alerts to specific teams and only sends messages to the people that are actually on-call. App response time way above the normal value? Send an alert to the app support engineer that is on call, not all of his colleagues. Not having to sift through a bunch of irrelevant alerts means that when one does come through you can be sure it requires YOUR attention right away.
Automatic Escalations
If you are only sending a notification and assigning an incident to one person, what happens if that person is out of the office or doesn’t have access to the internet / phone to respond to the alert? Well, the good thing about the power of PagerDuty is that you can build in automatic escalations. So, if you have a trigger in AppDynamics to fire off a PagerDuty alert when a node is down, and the infrastructure manager isn’t available, you can automatically escalate and re-assign / alert a backup employee or admin.
The Sky is Falling! Oh Wait – We’re Just Conducting Maintenance…
Another potentially annoying situation for IT teams are all of the alerts that get fired off during a maintenance window. PagerDuty has the concept of a maintenance window so your team doesn’t get a bunch of doomsday messages during maintenance. You can even setup a maintenance window with one click if you prefer to go that route.
Either way, no new incidents will be created during this time period… meaning your team will be spared having to open, read, and file the alerts and update / close out the newly-created incidents in the system.
We’re confident this integration of the leading application performance management solution with the leading IT incident management solution will save your team time and make them more productive. Check out the AppDynamics and PagerDuty integration today!
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Introducing AppDynamics for PHP
Posted by App Man | Mar, 18, 2013 | In Agile & DevOps, APM Best Practice, APM Thought Leadership, News, PHP
2 Comments
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.
Link to this 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
Application Runbook Automation – A Detailed Walk Through
Posted by Jim Hirschauer | Mar, 14, 2013 | In News
2 Comments
On Monday AppDynamics announced a new feature called Application Runbook Automation (RBA). The response to this announcement has been great and many people want to see the details on how we implement RBA within AppDynamics. If you attended one of our customer webinars for AppDynamics 3.7 Sneak Peek then you got to see RBA in action during a live demo. Here is a link to the webinar recording in case you want to see for yourself. After all, a video is worth a million words. Otherwise, I’m going to walk you through it step by step in this blog post.
If you don’t already know WHY we built Application RBA please read “Don’t Be An “Also-Ran” – Application Runbook Automation for World Class IT”
Let’s jump right in…
Link to this post:Application Performance Management, Application Runbook Automation, automation, RBA, runbook