I have yet to meet anyone in Dev or Ops who likes alerts. I’ve also yet to meet anyone who was fast enough to acknowledge an alert, so they could prevent an application from slowing down or crashing. In the real world alerts just don’t work, nobody has the time or patience anymore, alerts are truly evil and no-one trusts them. The most efficient alert today is an angry end user phone call, because Dev and Ops physically hear and feel the pain of someone suffering

Why? There is little or no intelligence in how a monitoring solution determines what is normal or abnormal for application performance. Today, monitoring solutions are only as good as the users that configure them, which is bad news because humans make mistakes, configuration takes time, and time is something many of us have little of.

Its therefore no surprise to learn that behavioral learning and analytics are becoming key requirements for modern application performance monitoring (APM) solutions. In fact, Will Capelli from Gartner recently published a report on IT Operational Analytics and pattern based strategies in the data center. The report covered the role of Complex Event Processing (CEP), behavior learning engines (BLEs) and analytics as a means for monitoring solutions to deliver better intelligence and quality information to Dev and Ops. Rather than just collect, store and report data, monitoring solutions must now learn and make sense of the data they collect, thus enabling them to become smarter and deliver better intelligence back to their users.

Change is constant for applications and infrastructure thanks to agile cycles, therefore monitoring solutions must also change so they can adapt and stay relevant. For example, if the performance of a business transaction in an application is 2.5 secs one week, and that drops to 200ms the week after because of a development fix. 200ms should become the new performance baseline for that same transaction, otherwise the monitoring solution won’t learn or alert of any performance regression. If the end user experience of a business transaction goes from 2.5 secs to 200ms, then end user expectations change instantly, and users become used to an instant response. Monitoring solutions have to keep up with user expectations, otherwise IT will become blind to the one thing that impacts customer loyalty and experience the most.

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Analytics, apm, Application Diagnostics, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, Behavioral Learning, Business Transaction Management, Business Transactions, CEP, Complex Event Processing

apm, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, Baselining, BTM, Business Transactions, CA Wily, Lew Cirne, normal performance, Wily Introscope

This is my first blog.  I’ve been a sales engineer for three application performance management (APM) products over the last 7 years (CA Wily Introscope, SpringSource/Hyperic, and now AppDynamics). I hadn’t really considered myself much of a “blogger” because I have alway thought that actions speak louder than words.  So I guess you are wondering why I would start now.  I guess you could say I was inspired by a recent experience at a customer site. It was quite a bit different than what I’ve been used to in my earlier APM career.

We recently had an experience with a customer who called and inquired about AppDynamics for monitoring several of their mission critical applications. As always our sales team kicked into high gear and had a conversation with the customer.  In less than 15 minutes we  agreed to start a Proof of Concept for AppDynamics running on a critical application.  Later that day, we setup an online conference with the customer and commenced an installation that took about 15 minutes.

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apm, APM Proof of Concept, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transactions, CA Wily, Hyperic, Spring

The majority of us in IT are specialists, with the exception of a few VPs of engineering who are “special” in their own “special” world of being “special.” What I mean by this is that no single person has the skills or experience to do everything well in IT. IT is too big for me to explain or summarize in a few words, other than it requires a lot of different people with different skills to make it tick along. Despite applications being the living breathing entities of the business, a large portion of folk in IT have little context of how applications are built, how they execute, and how they consume resource across the IT infrastructure. Many people simply don’t care as their responsibilities are completely void of anything application related. That’s fine–but the reality is that everyone in IT should have one eye on the business. The whole reason IT exists is so the business can be more competitive and make more money. If this happens, IT gets more budget and is allowed to innovate more. IT and the business need each other to survive, which is why when applications slow down or break, both parties bitch at each other.

Operations need better visibility

Unfortunately for both the business and IT, the people (Operations) who manage the performance and availability of applications in production aren’t application experts. They are also not stupid either; their skills sets are wide and broad across many technologies and platforms that underpin applications. They manage a lot of things that application developers take for granted, like networks, databases, storage and virtualization. While Operations monitor the health of these infrastructure components, they often get bombarded with crap from the business when end users and business transactions are being impacted by slow performance, despite all system monitoring showing everything is fine. This lack of understanding between the Business and Operations is because both parties see things from different perspectives.

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apm, appdynamics, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transactions, CA Wily, Compuware, DevOps, Dynatrace, HP BAC, IBM Tivoli, Nastel, 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

Back in April this year, we announced new monitoring support for NoSQL tecnhnologies like Cassandra and Memcached which was received really well by our customers. Due to further demand we’ve seen over the past few months from prospects and customers we’ve officially added MongoDB to our platform support, thus extending our coverage of NoSQL technologies.

For those not familiar with MongoDB, here’s how it differs from the traditional relational database just so you know what data and context AppDynamics provides for monitoring MongoDB applications:

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apm, Application Performance Management, BSON, BSON Query Performance, Business Transactions, MongoDB, MongoDB Monitoring, MongoDB Performance

APM doesn’t need to cost what it cost 10 years ago.  Today, the costs of APM ownership can vary significantly depending on what solution you deploy. As the saying goes, “Buyer Beware.”

In addition, there are four ownership costs to be evaluated before making a purchase, three of which may not be obvious and may lead to unpleasant surprises.

1. APM Software Licenses
2. Hardware/System Software Required to Operate APM Software
3. APM Deployment & Instrumentation Costs
4. APM Ongoing Maintenance Costs

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apm, APM as a Service, APM licenses, APM licensing, APm SaaS, appdynamics, AppDynamics Pricing, Application Performance Management, Business Transactions, CA Wily Licenses, CA Wily Pricing, CA Wily Sizing, Cost of APM, Cost of application performance management, Dynatrace licenses, Dynatrace pricing, Dynatrace Sizing, Instrumentation, Owning APM

Last week I published my winning Customer X-Ray of the Quarter, which showed how AppDynamics was able to help a media customer solve a production issue that had plagued their application for over two years. This week I’m posting the runner-up X-Ray entry. This one describes how AppDynamics was able to help an Insurance customer avoid a production outage by spotting a major bottleneck as their application was migrated from dev to pre-production during performance testing. All of the X-Rays you see published in this blog were written by customers, so the stories you read are real, factual, and credible.

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apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transaction Management, Business Transactions, Insurance, Monitoring Production, MTTR, Prevent business impact, Root Cause Analysis, Slow Application, Slow Response Times

Six months ago I did something really stupid. I foolishly jumped on the social media bandwagon, thinking I could become the first super hero to claim online greatness. Sadly, the only meteoric rise has been the disk space quota for my email server inbox–all thanks to the billion notifications I now get daily from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. For all I know I could have been poked by He-Man, tweeted by Krusty the Clown or propositioned by Batman to join forces on LinkedIn. Sadly, the amount of crap I get these days from trigger-happy social media apps means I simply ignore and delete 99.9% of messages without ever reading them.

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Alert Storming, apm, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transaction Management, Business Transactions, Dynamic Baselining, MTTR, Performance Monitoring, Static vs Dynamics baselines, Systems Monitoring