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

Everyday in our life we rely on services provided by other people. Making a phone call, getting a car fixed, or ordering a pizza – and yet we want those things to happen as quickly as possible, because time often means money. If you take your car to a Mercedes or BMW dealer, you will understand this point better than anyone. Our productivity (and often happiness) is therefore controlled, everyday, by different organizations and people. When things slow down or don’t happen we get upset, frustrated, and sometimes rant on twitter like these folk:

If your application today has SOA design principles, is heavily distributed and relies on 3rd party service providers, then you’ve probably become frustrated at some point when your application slows down or crashes. The problem is this: your end user experience and quality of service (QoS) is only as good as the QoS of your service providers. So, unless you monitor QoS you can’t measure QoS–and if you can’t measure QoS, you can’t manage your service providers and your end user experience. For example, take a look at this customer e-commerce application which has 7 JVM’s, 1 database and 7 external web service providers:

This customer recently had a slowdown with their e-commerce production application. After a few minutes browsing AppDynamics, they successfully identified that one of their web service providers was having latency issues (AppDynamics automatically baselines performance and flags deviations for each web service provider as shown in the above screenshot). The customer called their service provider, and sure enough the service provider admitted to having issues. A few hours later the service provider called back and said “we fixed the problem, everything should be back to normal”–yet the customer could clearly see latency issues still occurring in AppDynamics. So they sent their service provider a screenshot showing the evidence. The service provider then checked again, and called back a few minutes later saying “Yes, sorry a few customers are still being impacted.” Without this level of visibility, many organizations are simply blind to how external service providers impact their end user experience and business.

Being able to troubleshoot slow performance in minutes is helpful, but what about being able to report the exact service level you receive–say, from each of your service providers over a period of time? Did your service improve over time or did it regress? How many outages or severity 1 incidents did your service providers cause this week for your application?

Take the below screenshot from AppDynamics, which plots the maximum response time for five different web services consumed by an application over the last week. You can see that three out of the five web services (denoted by pink, blue and turquoise lines) consistently deliver sub-second response times and provide a great service level. However, the other two web services (red and green lines) show performance spikes with response times of between 14 and 22 seconds. The green web service in particular is very inconsistent and shows several performance spikes in two days.

Below is the response time of another web service (PayPal) for a customer application over the last 3 months. Notice the spikes in response time and look at the deviation between average and maximum response time over the time period. What’s impressive is that despite the occasional service blip, the PayPal service has slowly improved by 14% from 450 milliseconds to around 385 milliseconds. It’s also been very stable the last few weeks, along with having a consistent service (small deviation from average and maximum response time).

If your application relies on one or more 3rd party web services, you should periodically check and report what level of service you are receiving each week. That way, you can truly understand your service provider QoS and its impact on your end user experience and application performance. You can also keep your service providers honest, with complete visibility of whether QoS is improving or degrading over time as service outages occur and are fixed.

The next time you experience a slow down or outage in your application, you should first check external web services before you start to troubleshoot your own. The last thing you want to be doing is debugging your own code, when it could be someone else’s service and code that is causing the issue. Using AppDynamics it’s possible to monitor, measure, and manage the QoS from each of your web service providers. You can get started right now by downloading AppDynamics Lite (our free edition) for a single JVM or IIS web server, or you can request a 30-day trial of AppDynamics Pro (our commercial edition) for Java or .NET applications with multiple JVMs and IIS web servers.

apm, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transaction Management, Slow web services, SOA monitoring, Web Service Monitoring

Last week I flew into Las Vegas for #Interop fully suited and booted in my big blue costume (no joke). I’d been invited to speak in a vendor debate on User eXperience (UX): Monitor the Application or the Network? NetScout represented the Network, AppDynamics (and me) represented the Application, and “Compuware dynaTrace Gomez” sat on the fence representing both. Moderating was Jim Frey from EMA, who did a great job introducing the subject, asking the questions and keeping the debate flowing.

At the start each vendor gave their usual intro and company pitch, followed by their own definition on what User Experience is.

Defining User Experience

So at this point you’d probably expect me to blabber on about how application code and agents are critical for monitoring the UX? Wrong. For me, users experience “Business Transactions”–they don’t experience applications, infrastructure, or networks. When a user complains, they normally say something like “I can’t Login” or “My checkout timed out.” I can honestly say I’ve never heard them say –  ”The CPU utilization on your machine is too high” or “I don’t think you have enough memory allocated.”

Now think about that from a monitoring perspective. Do most organizations today monitor business transactions? Or do they monitor application infrastructure and networks? The truth is the latter, normally with several toolsets. So the question “Monitor the Application or the Network?” is really the wrong question for me. Unless you monitor business transactions, you are never going to understand what your end users actually experience.

Monitoring Business Transactions

So how do you monitor business transactions? The reality is that both Application and Network monitoring tools are capable, but most solutions have been designed not to–just so they provide a more technical view for application developers and network engineers. This is wrong, very wrong and a primary reason why IT never sees what the end user sees or complains about. Today, SOA means applications are more complex and distributed, meaning a single business transaction could traverse multiple applications that potentially share services and infrastructure. If your monitoring solution doesn’t have business transaction context, you’re basically blind to how application infrastructure is impacting your UX.

The debate then switched to how monitoring the UX differs from an application and network perspective. Simply put, application monitoring relies on agents, while network monitoring relies on sniffing network traffic passively. My point here was that you can either monitor user experience with the network or you can manage it with the application. For example, with network monitoring you only see business transactions and the application infrastructure, because you’re monitoring at the network layer. In contrast, with application monitoring you see business transactions, application infrastructure, and the application logic (hence why it’s called application monitoring).

Monitor or Manage the UX?

Both application and network monitoring can identify and isolate UX degradation, because they see how a business transaction executes across the application infrastructure. However, you can only manage UX if you can understand what’s causing the degradation. To do this you need deep visibility into the application run-time and logic (code). Operations telling a Development team that their JVM is responsible for a user experience issue is a bit like Fedex telling a customer their package is lost somewhere in Alaska. Identifying and Isolating pain is useful, but one could argue it’s pointless without being able to manage and resolve the pain (through finding the root cause).

Netscout made the point that with network monitoring you can identify common bottlenecks in the network that are responsible for degrading the UX. I have no doubt you could, but if you look at the most common reason for UX issues, it’s related to change–and if you look at what changes the most, it’s application logic. Why? Because Development and Operations teams want to be agile, so their applications and business remains competitive in the marketplace. Agile release cycles means application logic (code) constantly changes. It’s therefore not unusual for an application to change several times a week, and that’s before you count hotfixes and patches. So if applications change more than the network, then one could argue it’s more effective for monitoring and managing the end user experience.

UX and Web Applications

We then debated which monitoring concept was better for web-based applications. Obviously, network monitoring is able to monitor the UX by sniffing HTTP packets passively, so it’s possible to get granular visibility on QoS in the network and application. However, the recent adoption of Web 2.0 technologies (ajax, GWT, Dojo) means application logic is now moving from the application server to the users browser. This means browser processing time becomes a critical part of the UX. Unfortunately, Network monitoring solutions can’t monitor browser processing latency (because they monitor the network), unlike application monitoring solutions that can use techniques like client-side instrumentation or web-page injection to obtain browser latency for the UX.

The C Word

We then got to the Cloud and which made more sense for monitoring UX. Well, network monitoring solutions are normally hardware appliances which plug direct into a network tap or span port. I’ve never asked, but I’d imagine the guys in Seattle (Amazon) and Redmond (Windows Azure) probably wouldn’t let you wheel a network monitoring appliance into their data-centre. More importantly, why would you need to if you’re already paying someone else to manage your infrastructure and network for you? Moving to the Cloud is about agility, and letting someone else deal with the hardware and pipes so you can focus on making your application and business competitive. It’s actually very easy for application monitoring solutions to monitor UX in the cloud. Agents can piggy back with application code libraries when they’re deployed to the cloud, or cloud providers can embed and provision vendor agents as part of their server builds and provisioning process.

What’s interesting also is that Cloud is highlighting a trend towards DevOps (or NoOps for a few organizations) where Operations become more focused on applications vs infrastructure. As the network and infrastructure becomes abstracted in the Public Cloud, then the focus naturally shifts to the application and deployment of code. For private clouds you’ll still have network Ops and Engineering teams that build and support the Cloud platform, but they wouldn’t be the people who care about user experience. Those people would be the Line of Business or application owners which the UX impacts.

In reality most organizations today already monitor the application infrastructure and network. However, if you want to start monitoring the true UX, you should monitor what your users experience, and that is business transactions. If you can’t see your users’ business transactions, you can’t manage their experience.

What are your thoughts on this?

AppDynamics is an application monitoring solution that helps you monitor business transactions and manage the true user experience. To get started sign-up for a 30-day free trial here.

I did have an hour spare at #Interop after my debate to meet and greet our competitors, before flying back to AppDynamics HQ. It was nice to see many of them meet and greet the APM Caped Crusader.

App Man.

apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transaction Management, Compuware, Dynatrace, End User Monitoring, Gomez, Interop, NetScout, Network Performance Management, NPM, User Experience

The most enjoyable part of my job at AppDynamics is to witness and evangelize customer success. What’s slightly strange is that for this to happen, an application has to slow down or crash.

It’s a bittersweet feeling when End Users, Operations, Developers and many Businesses suffer application performance pain. Outages cost the business money, but sometimes they cost people their jobs–which is truly unfortunate. However, when people solve performance issues, they become overnight heroes with a great sense of achievement, pride, and obviously relief.

To explain the complexity of managing application performance, imagine your application is 100 haystacks that represent tiers, and somewhere a needle is hurting your end user experience. It’s your job to find the needle as quickly as possible! The problem is, each haystack has over half a million pieces of hay, and they each represent lines of code in your application. It’s therefore no surprise that organizations can take days or weeks to find the root cause of performance issues in large, complex, distributed production environments.

End User Experience Monitoring, Application Mapping and Transaction profiling will help you identify unhappy users, slow business transactions, and problematic haystacks (tiers) in your application, but they won’t find needles. To do this, you’ll need x-ray visibility inside haystacks to see which pieces of hay (lines of code) are holding the needle (root cause) that is hurting your end users. This X-Ray visibility is known as “Deep Diagnostics” in application monitoring terms, and it represents the difference between isolating performance issues and resolving them.

For example, AppDynamics has great End User Monitoring, Business Transaction Monitoring, Application Flow Maps and very cool analytics all integrated into a single product. They all look and sound great (honestly they do), but they only identify and isolate performance issues to an application tier. This is largely what Business Transaction Management (BTM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) solutions do today. They’ll tell you what and where a business transaction slows down, but they won’t tell you the root cause so you can resolve the issues.

Why Deep Diagnostics for Production Monitoring Matters

A key reason why AppDynamics has become very successful in just a few years is because our Deep Diagnostics, behavioral learning, and analytics technology is 18 months ahead of the nearest vendor. A bold claim? Perhaps, but it’s backed up by bold customer case studies such as Edmunds.com and Karavel, who compared us against some of the top vendors in the application performance management (APM) market in 2011. Yes, End User Monitoring, Application Mapping and Transaction Profiling are important–but these capabilities will only help you isolate performance pain, not resolve it.

AppDynamics has the ability to instantly show the complete code execution and timing of slow user requests or business transactions for any Java or .NET application, in production, with incredibly small overhead and no configuration. We basically give customers a metal detector and X-Ray vision to help them find needles in haystacks. Locating the exact line of code responsible for a performance issue means Operations and Developers solve business pain faster, and this is a key reason why AppDynamics technology is disrupting the market.

Below is a small collection of needles that customers found using AppDynamics in production. The simple fact is that complete code visibility allows customers to troubleshoot in minutes as opposed to days and weeks. Monitoring with blind spots and configuring instrumentation are a thing of the past with AppDynamics.

Needle #1 – Slow SQL Statement

Industry: Education
Pain: Key Business Transaction with 5 sec response times
Root Cause: Slow JDBC query with full-table scan

Needle #2 – Slice of Death in Cassandra

Industry: SaaS Provider
Pain: Key Business Transaction with 2.5 sec response times
Root Cause: Slow Thrift query in Cassandra

Needle #3 – Slow & Chatty Web Service Calls

Industry: Media
Pain: Several Business Transactions with 2.5 min response times
Root Cause: Excessive Web Service Invocation (5+ per trx)

Needle #4 -Extreme XML processing

Industry: Retail/E-Commerce
Pain: Key Business Transaction with 17 sec response times
Root Cause: XML serialization over the wire.

Needle #5 – Mail Server Connectivity

Industry: Retail/E-Commerce
Pain: Key Business Transaction with 20 sec response times
Root Cause: Slow Mail Server Connectivity

 Needle #6 – Slow ResultSet Iteration

Industry: Retail/E-Commerce
Pain: Several Business Transactions with 30+ sec response times
Root Cause: Querying too much data

Needle #7 – Slow Security 3rd Party Framework

Industry: Education
Pain: All Business Transactions with > 3 sec response times
Root Cause: Slow 3rd party code

Needle #8 – Excessive SQL Queries

Industry: Education
Pain: Key Business Transactions with 2 min response times
Root Cause: Thousands of SQL queries per transaction

Needle #9 – Commit Happy

Industry: Retail/E-Commerce
Pain: Several Business Transactions with 25+ sec response times
Root Cause: Unnecessary use of commits and transaction management.

Needle #10 – Locking under Concurrency

Industry: Retail/E-Commerce
Pain: Several Business Transactions with 5+ sec response times
Root Cause: Non-Thread safe cache forces locking for read/write consistency

 Needle #11 – Slow 3rd Party Search Service

Industry: SaaS Provider
Pain: Key Business Transaction with 2+ min response times
Root Cause: Slow 3rd Party code

 Needle #12 – Connection Pool Exhaustion

Industry: Financial Services
Pain: Several Business Transactions with 7+ sec response times
Root Cause: DB Connection Pool Exhaustion caused by excessive connection pool invocation & queries

Needle #13 – Excessive Cache Usage

Industry: Retail/E-Commerce
Pain: Several Business Transactions with 50+ sec response times
Root Cause: Cache Sizing & Configuration

If you want to manage and troubleshoot application performance in production, you should seriously consider AppDynamics. We’re the fastest growing on-premise and SaaS based APM vendor in the market right now. You can download our free product AppDynamics Lite or take a free 30-day trial of AppDynamics Pro – our commercial product.

Now go find those needles that are hurting your end users!

App Man.

apm, appdynamics, AppDynamics Pro, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transaction Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Deep Diagnostics, Dynatrace, End User Monitoring, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Production Monitoring, Root Cause Analysis, Transaction Profiling