Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, JP Garbani, gives readers very pragmatic advice on the raison d’etre for APM.  Simply put, APM’s job is to:

1) Alert IT to application performance and availability issues before a full-scale outage occurs

2) Isolate or pinpoint the problem source

3) Provide deep-diagnostics to enable IT to determine the root cause

For several years now, JP Garbani has been on the forefront of proclaiming that modern APM solutions should enable IT organizations to manage apps not by gauging the heath of their servers or servlets, but instead by assessing what the customer or end-user cares about most – whether their Business Transaction completes quickly and doesn’t make them wait.  He states that this has become even more critical as applications have gotten more distributed and complex.

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apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Forrester APM, Forrester APM Market Overview, Nastel, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Precise

People in our industry always talk about IT complexity and cost. Cost is pretty easy to calculate, because IT budgets are allocated and audited every year. Complexity is very different–we know it exists, but we can’t really see or measure it. Complexity is often when our brain tries to understand something and stalls in the process, trying to make sense of information that has never been seen before.

Well, this happened to a few of us in AppDynamics last week. A customer was kind enough to share how a single login business transaction flowed across their entire infrastructure. You might be thinking: “How can a login transaction be complex? That’s just a simple call to an LDAP or SiteMinder tier”–which is pretty much what we all thought it was. However, the screenshot that graced us was one of shock, beauty and amazement. In fact, I’m looking at it right now before I scrub the customer details, and I’m still thinking “Hmmmm, this is bonkers.”

Without delaying further, here is that very screenshot showing the Login Business Transaction:

Scary huh? What you see is the flow and timing of a Customer Login business transaction as it executes across a well governed, regulated, SOA environment consisting of many services (denoted by the Java Tiers). The Customer Login transaction begins at the Java node to the right marked “START” and propagates across the entire SOA environment using a combination of sync/async JMS messages, HTTP and RMI communication to notify other Services that a customer is now active and logged in. You can also see many services writing to a database as a result of this transaction. These invocations are simply auditing the customer login to satisfy the legal regulations that this organization has to comply with. So if you ever wonder what impact Governance and Legislation has on IT, this is a perfect example of the complexity storm it creates. What’s interesting is that the Logout business transaction for this application was just as complex!

The screenshot above unfortunately reflects the enormous complexity that many IT departments have to deal with everyday, especially when a user complains that their business transaction is slow. The problem for 95% of IT departments is they don’t have this type of visibility in production. They can feel pain, but they can’t see it. A slow business transaction may take 25 seconds to complete and touch many infrastructure tiers along the way. Unless IT sees this end to end journey they’ll always struggle to troubleshoot and manage it.

The good news is you’re 30 minutes away from getting this visibility in production by evaluating a next generation application monitoring solution like AppDynamics Pro. AppDynamics will auto-discover your business transactions, map their specific flows across your infrastructure, and give you a latency breakdown across and inside every tier the business transaction touches.

To manage and master IT complexity you have to visualize and see it.  Seeing how your business actually runs across IT is completely different to guessing how your business runs across IT. Next time a user complains that their business transaction is slow, what will you do? Bury your head in a log file, or visualize how that business transaction executed using an application performance monitoring solution like AppDynamics?

Isn’t it about time you mapped your app?

App Man.

apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Monitoring, BTM, Business Transaction Management, Business Transaction Performance, Distributed Transaction, Dynatrace, End to End Transaction Flow, Nastel, New Relic, OpTier, SOA Environment

How intelligent is your monitoring agent?

The agent should not do too much processing locally to ensure minimal impact to application performance by utilizing the smallest CPU and memory footprint possible. On the other hand, offloading some processing to the agent results in less network traffic and more scalability from the monitoring Mgmt Server.

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apm, appdynamics, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, BTM, Business Transaction Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, HP BAC, IBM ITCAM, Monitoring Agents, OpNet, OpTier

I thought it would be good to start blogging about my experiences with customers just so you get an idea of how important Application Performance Management (APM) has become.

A few weeks back I met with a customer who had issues, the expression on their face said it all. It started with an apology that several people couldn’t make our meeting, why? because they were investigating a production outage. You might think I’ve just made that up, I can assure you this was real and a frequent event which I’ve witnessed many a time. It can be especially annoying when you’ve travelled many miles to chat with a customer expecting to have a productive meeting and then the alarm bells ring. However, an outage in this scenario just validates the reason why you’re there in the first place.

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apm, APM as a Service, APM on demand, appdynamics, AppDynamics Monitoring, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, Business Transactions, Production Outage, Root Cause Analysis, Solving Performance Issues

Gartner recently released their latest magic quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and in this report mentioned five key dimensions, two of which were Application Mapping and Transaction Profiling. These two dimensions are critical for users to identify performance bottlenecks in distributed applications, whose architecture design is typically based around SOA or Cloud concepts.

The point we’d like to emphasize in this post is this: To quickly find bottlenecks in distributed or SOA architectures, these two dimensions must be visible simultaneously to the user (troubleshooter).  Ok, get ready, we’re going to say something very “unvendor” – these two dimensions should actually be “features” and not separate “products”.   The only two APM products that combine these views in a single product today are AppDynamics and dynaTrace.

Unfortunately, the rest of the APM solutions don’t work that way. Most of the APM vendors who claimed to support these two dimensions for the MQ require customers to buy two or more distinct products – one of them usually a re-branded CMDB tool. The downside is that it is nowhere near as efficient, especially if the troubleshooter has to log into 2-3 different products and has to try to stitch together this view in their own mind.

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apm, appdynamics, Application Mapping, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, BTM, Business Transactions, Gartner APM Magic Quadrant, Transaction Profiling

On Tuesday, Gartner announced this year’s Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM).   I’ll make a few observations from reading the MQ and then suggest 3 additional criteria that APM buyers should consider to make informed buying decisions.

The research report started with an analysis of the APM market growth at 15% year-over-year and $2 billion in total market spend.  These facts reflect what we see every day – the market for APM is very strong and benefits from the high growth in web-driven commerce.  Web apps just can’t be slow.

One key APM growth driver is that modern applications have become more difficult to monitor – with more moving parts and a higher rate of change. Gartner summarizes this nicely in their market overview:

“Unfortunately, at just the moment when executives have become keen about imposing an application-centric view of the world on IT operations, applications have become far more difficult to monitor; in general, architectures have become more modular, redundant, distributed and dynamic, often laying down the particular twists and turns that a code execution path could take at the latest possible moment.”

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apm, appdynamics, Application Performance, Application Performance Monitoring, BTM, Business Transaction Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Gartner, Gartner APM Magic Quadrant, HP, IBM, OpNet, OpTier