Round Two – Last time I wrote a blog comparing APM versus network-based APM tools, which I still consider NPM at it’s core regardless of what some critics and competitors claim. Let me make one thing clear though, NPM is great for equipping IT network administrators to see how fast or slow data is traveling through the pipes of their application. Unfortunately, network-based APM tools simply cannot provide App Ops granular visibility into the application runtime when isolating bottlenecks go beyond the system level and it’s final destination – the end user’s browser.

I find several of the blogs and YouTube clips from such NPM vendors quite comical as they try to throw punches at APM companies. Their arguments are centered primarily against agent-based approaches being an inadequate APM solution due to today’s fickle and distributed application architectures. It’s not like I haven’t heard it before.

The amusing thing about it…they’re completely right! In fact, we couldn’t agree more, and that’s why Jyoti Bansal founded AppDynamics to address these perennial shortcomings legacy APM vendors have been ignoring. Even the smallest businesses next to the largest enterprises have complex applications that have outpaced their App Ops teams’ current set of monitoring tools. That’s why AppDynamics is reinventing and reigniting the application performance management space by enabling IT operations to monitor complex, modern applications running in the cloud or the data center. So let me respond to those claims they’ve made.

The Claims

“Agents have high deployment and ongoing maintenance burden.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. No manual instrumentation required. It’s automatic.

“Agents are invasive which can perturb the systems being monitored.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. Our customers see less than 1-2% overhead in production. 

“Performance management vendors have over promised and under delivered for decades.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. Things are going well thanks. Check our customer list and 400% growth.

All AppDynamics. The next-gen of APM.

Example FedEx App with application performance issues

I drew a parallel in my previous post that using NPM concepts to monitor application performance is like inspecting Fedex packages en-route to figure out why operations at a hub came to a screeching halt. Remember, even if the package contents is visible from afar, it doesn’t explain why the hub conveyors, which electronically guide packages to their appropriate destination chute is broken, nor can it identify why cargo operations have stalled. In other words, good luck trying to gather anything beyond the scope of the application’s infrastructure. Using network monitoring tools to collect even the most basic system health metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, thread pool consumption and thrashing? Time to throw in the towel.

And what about End User Monitoring?

What’s becoming just as important as being able to monitor server side processing and network time is the ability to monitor end user performance. When NPM tools are only able to see the last packet sent from the server, how does that help you understand the browser’s performance? It doesn’t since once again, this kind of analysis is only feasible higher up the stack at the Application Layer. And just to clarify when I say Application Layer, I mean application execution time, not “network process time to application” as defined by OSI Layer 7.

On the other hand, injected agents residing in that layer can insert JavaScript into the Web page to determine the execution time spent in the browser. This is becoming more of a concern for App Ops and Dev Ops now that 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend executing JavaScript, rendering markup and stylesheets. As business logic continues it’s migration to the browser while increasing it’s processing burden, the client is looking more and more like the new server. Network monitoring tools must move to an agent-based approach if they are to truly deliver the monitoring visibility needed for the application and end user experience, otherwise their visibility will remain between a rock and a hard place.

On top of that, what about those customers running their applications in a public cloud? Are you going to convince your cloud provider to install a network appliance into their infrastructure? I highly doubt it. With AppDynamics, we have partnerships with cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Azure, RightScale and Opsource allowing developers and operations to easily deploy AppDynamics with a flick of a switch and monitor their applications in production 24/7.

Once again, next-gen APM triumphs over NPM based application performance on not just the server side, but also the browser. AppDynamics is embracing this and fully aware of the technical and business significance of monitoring end user performance. We’re delighted to offer this kind of end-to-end visibility to our customers who will now be able to monitor application performance from the end users’ browser to the backend application tiers (databases, mainframes), all through a single pane of glass view.

apm, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, End User Monitoring, EUM, Gartner, Network Monitoring, NPM

A new year, a new iPhone and a new quarter. What else is new? How about a new company?

Last month I was fortunate enough to join a stellar marketing team at one of the fastest growing enterprise software startups in the bay area. The company you ask? AppDynamics, and did I mention we’re also the leading next generation Application Performance Management (APM) provider for modern architectures in distributed, cloud, virtualized and on-premise environments? We exceeded our targets for 2011 achieving an astonishing 400% growth in bookings. Not too shabby for being the new kid on the block in a competitive market already inundated with vendors. You have old school APM tools from megavendors like CA, HP and Compuware (was dynaTrace). Then you have the new school breed such as New Relic and AppDynamics. In fact, Gartner’s MQ lists over twenty vendors. So with such a crowded market why did I even consider such a move?

Well there’s a laundry list of reasons, but here are the top ones that come to mind.

1. Business Innovation. This is another kind of BI not just Business Intelligence. It’s really a breath of fresh air to be working with an organization that is not only obsessed with pumping out insanely great technology every few quarters or so, but also open to embracing innovative approaches to every discipline of the business including creative marketing and sales strategies. Often times enterprise software companies unabashedly attempt to cloak themselves in slideware selling a “vision” or an enterprise solution poles apart from reality. Unfortunately when it comes down to an actual evaluation, you end up having to attend a dozen meetings just to see an applicable demo, a one week to two month proof-of-concept followed by throwing millions of dollars at consulting and implementation services, which segues to my next point.

2. Ease-of-Use. This simple yet powerful concept has been repeatedly neglected or intentionally ignored by many enterprise software companies. Luckily, the Leaders of the New School such as Apple, Salesforce, Box, etc. (not Busta Rhymes group) have changed the way end users value an intuitive user interface and design. At AppDynamics, we’ve adopted a similar mindshare. “Easy” is the new world order in this industry because the managers, engineers and folks in IT operations are encountering enough complexity as it is with these modern architectures. I doubt the last thing that they want is another tool to further complicate their lives causing more frustration on the job. At the end of the day everyone is a consumer – the least common denominator – who wants to use software that helps us demystify our lives and makes us successful at our jobs (unless you’re a sadist).

Software that is easy to install, implement and use can have a tremendous impact on the bottom-line of a business. Suppose you end up rolling out a new system but end up having to spend a chunk of company change on implementation and training costs. What impact does that have on your productivity and ultimately your company’s bottom-line? Here’s an example from Avon’s Q3, 2011 earnings transcript,

“Despite extensive pre-implementation testing, we had greater than anticipated implementation challenges in the go-live. Significantly higher business complexity in this market contributed to a greater than expected level of disruption, as I said, when we went to the go-live environment.”

Many vendors make enterprise deployments akin to embarking on an IT version of manifest destiny. I’m sure you can think of a few applications in your own IT toolbox that fit the bill where at some point you ended up asking yourself, “Why can’t this be as easy as [fill in the blank with some consumer app]?”  Fig. 2. See empathetic frustrated user to your left.

That was compelling enough for me to join AppDynamics. We truly understand the business significance as to why software ought to be easy 360 degrees around especially in production. I’m not saying that the work designers and developers have to do to achieve this “Easy” goal is easy in itself. I have an unrequited love for the folks in engineering who possess the talent and perseverance in coding applications, but that doesn’t excuse a vendor from selling you a dream and then leaving you stranded to implement a nightmare all because there wasn’t enough emphasis on ease-of-use.

3. Application Performance. This one is near and dear to my heart and arguably the main reason for me to join AppDynamics. It takes me back to the challenging days and sleepless nights I endured while working on a massive global PDM implementation at LG Electronics jointly with Dassault Systemes. The year was 2008. Skynet hadn’t become self-aware yet. App Man was just A Man in the throes and woes of IT operations, and half way around the world over in Seoul, Korea I was managing juggling recurring performance issues on a weekly basis with our PMO having to answer to the beck and call of the LGE CIO. The project’s launch date had been delayed due to various complications with the implementation (that’s a whole other story). Any ideas what one of those might have entailed? If you guessed “performance”, congratulations! You’ve won! Download your free copy AppDynamics Lite.

Every week new customizations were being released from R&D back in the states, PS in Korea and SI’s sitting on the other side of the room. You could call it Agile development’s nemesis, frAgile development. The dynamic nature of our java-based environment only introduced more challenges to the performance team who were heads-down trying to reverse engineer someone else’s code and refactor it using APM tools that just didn’t provide us with the full visibility we needed to comprehensively profile and diagnose application performance issues (using JenniferSoft). In fact, one of the consultants on our team ended up creating his own profiler to expose these blind spots, but what we really needed was a next-generation APM tool that would visually map and connect the dots for us like the one below.

Then we ran into another stumbling block after we completed migrating legacy data to a new “production” environment. When the time came to retest the entire set of performance use cases in this new environment we experienced all kinds of performance regressions. Since everyone was collaborating so well with each other for over the past two years, we all cheerfully marched forward without any finger pointing as to what the root cause was. Ok, so it wasn’t that utopian. Fortunately, because of everyone’s undying commitment and personal sacrifices, the project went live successfully in mid 2010 with over 2,000 users visiting the system per day. In hindsight, we could have easily saved a month’s worth had we used a better tool thereby eliminating the usual suspects.

From that experience I’ve come to appreciate and understand how business-critical managing application performance is for any company. Now I am on a mission to spread the word of AppDynamics to help companies manage rapidly evolving, distributed environments.

Buckle up 2012, we’re just getting started.

Agile Development, App Man, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Ease-of-Use, HP, JenniferSoft, New Relic

Hey Santa Claus, what’s happening man?

Well, it’s that time of year again where unfortunately I have to work. Gift orders are up 50% and my elves are working their socks off right now stocking my warehouses for the big day. I honestly don’t know how I would have coped without my new ElfOps team–they’ve been elastic and fantastic thanks to our new AWS hosted applications. The bad news is that my applications have processed record orders in 2011 so I’ll have to work harder. Frankly, this sucks.

Come again? Santa is using the cloud?

Isn’t everyone these days? I mean what else can I possibly do when my orders and subscriptions double each year? If Santa can’t scale, I spend my vacation reading angry letters from parents about how I made their kids cry and upset on Christmas Day. Forget that. I’d rather sit on a beach in Hawaii drinking Mojito’s catching a nice tan. In fact, I should be able to upgrade myself to the Four Seasons in Hawaii in 2012 due to the money I’ve saved by migrating to the cloud. You simply wouldn’t believe how much my own data center was costing me, not to mention those expensive IT Elf consultants I had to bring in. I’m now a lean mean parcel delivering machine and it’s all thanks to the cloud.

Read the Full Post…

Amazon EC2, apm, App Man, appdynamics, Application Performance, Big Data, CA Wily, cloud, Hadoop, Order Fallout, Santa

I made my first public appearance last week at JavaOne and had a blast mixing it with the dev community and the various exhibitors. Prior to being bitten by radioactive byte code, I’d attended JavaOne as a developer and had fond memories of vast crowds, packed session rooms, and nonstop partying. While JavaOne ran in parallel to Oracle Open World again this year, the event actually felt independent despite San Francisco city being littered with Oracle posters. Walking into the venue every morning felt like it was still the biggest Java conference in the world, especially when you had corridors of developers checking email on bean bags. Java is very much alive, despite skeptics claiming its dead or has no future. If you had to write a new mission critical application for your business today, I’d expect the majority of organizations would still opt for Java despite the hype around other languages like Ruby, Python and the return of PHP.

I was attending JavaOne with AppDynamics as an exhibitor, and I’m pleased to report things went very well for us. What was surprising is that many attendees already knew who we were and what we did, and that wasn’t just from U.S. attendees. I spoke to lots of developers from Europe who were already using AppDynamics Lite and were keen to see a demo of our latest Pro edition.

We also met several attendees who were in the process of evaluating APM toolsets for their organizations. which was great. APM is definitely becoming a priority now for many application teams, with most struggling to get decent performance and visibility in production. I had one alarming conversation with an architect while he was briefing me on his team’s success criteria for selecting an APM solution. I heard the words “All the monitoring vendors tell me they run in production with a few percent overhead so I’ll take their word for it.” For me that’s like agreeing to a mortgage without asking each bank what their actual interest rates and terms & conditions are. My advice to this chap was along the lines of “trust no vendor and prove all overhead claims in production.” The reality today is very few APM vendors can run and scale in production–even though they all sound the same!

Speaking of APM vendors, both OpNet and Quest invited me over to their booth and asked if I’d mind having my photo taken with them. Being an APM superhero I was more than happy to accept their offer; it’s actually good to banter with competitors who have a sense of humor. I did try my best with the other APM vendor, but all the booth staff declined while staring at the floor–something about getting into trouble with their boss if they were seen with App Man. Maybe they were afraid of my X-Ray vision…

Here’s a brief photo diary of what I got up to at JavaOne:

Video Summary:

AppDynamics Customer TiVo stopped by to say Hello:

Grabbing a Coffee at Starbucks:

Meeting Dubu Panda from BMC:

Saying hello OpNet:

Saying hello to Quest:

Enjoying a Beer after a long day:

apm, App Man, Application Performance, Java, JavaOne, JavaOne11, OpNet, Oracle Open World, Quest

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.”

Read the Full Post…

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

Need help managing your Application Performance? Get started with AppDynamics Lite (Free Download) or AppDynamics Pro (Free 30 Day Trial)

apm, Application Performance, Appman

apm, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, BSM, BTM, Business Transaction Management, Business Transactions, MTTR, Root Cause Analysis

Listen to App Dynamic’s Director of Engineering talk about three main issues (the advent of the cloud, agility, and low-cost memory) that affect application performance in this IBM Java Zone technical podcast.

>> Listen to the Podcast

Agile Development, Application Challenges, Application Performance, Bhaskar Sunkara, cloud, IBM Java Zone