appdynamics, Application Performance Management, cloud computing, Cloud Migration, Dev, DevOps, Ops, Private Cloud

We’re pretty lucky these days to work and play with lots of cool stuff. In a consumer world of HD TVs, Mac books, iPhones, Droids, Angry Birds, Face books and tweets, life is rarely boring. Working in IT is the same. We’ve got clouds, NoSQL, agile, SOA, ria, pythons, scalas, rubies, and lots of ideas and technologies to play with every week. If only our friends and relatives outside of IT could figure out what the hell we’re all excited about, and the simple fact that most of us aren’t millionaires.

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Agile & DevOps, Agile methodology, Agile Ops, Business Transactions, cloud computing, Development, DevOps

apm, Appman, cloud computing, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Public Meets Private

In my previous blog I’ve written about the hard work needed to successfully migrate applications to the cloud.   But why go through all that work to get to the cloud? It’s to take advantage of the dynamic nature of the cloud with the ability (and agility) to quickly scale applications. Your application’s load probably changes all day, all week, and all year. Now your application can utilize more or less resources based on the changes in load. Just ask the cloud for as much computing resources that you need at any given time, and unlike at data centers, the resources are available at the push of a button.

But that only works during the marketing video. Back in the real world, no one can find that magic button to push. Instead scaling in the cloud involves pushing many buttons, running many scripts, configuring various software, and then fixing whatever didn’t quite work. Oh, and of course even that is the easy part, compared to actually knowing when to scale, how much to scale and even what parts of your application to scale. And this repeats all day, every day, at least until everyone gets discouraged.

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apm, APM Analytics, Cloud Bursting, cloud computing, cloud orchestration, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Scaling Apps

application monitoring, cloud computing, cloudfail, public clouds

I’m looking forward to my Cloud Connect panel, “Instrumenting Applications When Access Goes Away,” on Monday March 7th in Santa Clara. I’ve seen a lot of companies migrate their mission critical applications to the cloud. And what changes when companies start managing cloud-based apps?  To quote our customer, Adrian Cockcroft at Netflix– “Everything. Data center oriented tools don’t work in a cloud environment.”

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cloud computing, Cloud Connect

AppDynamics is spending the week in Las Vegas–or, as our Southwest pilot wisecracked as our plane descended, “Lost Wages.” But it’s not for fun—at least, not that kind of fun. We’re talking to prospects and customers at the 2010 Gartner Data Center conference.

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cloud computing, infrastructure, IT operations, virtualization

San Francisco’s QCon was expecting a smaller crowd, but ended up bursting at the seams: the event sold out weeks ahead of time and in many sessions it was standing room only.

Targeted at architects and operations folks as much as developers, QCon was heavy on the hot topics of the day: SOA, agile, and DevOps. But if there was a consistent trend throughout the three days, it was “No more theory. Show us the practice.”

At Jesper Boeg’s talk for example—“Raising the Bar: Using Kanban and Lean to Super Optimize Your Agile Implementation”—the talk was peppered with some good sound bites (“If it hurts, do it more often and bring the pain forward”). But it also stressed the meat: Boeg demonstrated a “deployment pipeline” that represented an automated implementation of the build, deploy, test, and release process—a way to find and eliminate bottlenecks in agile delivery.

Similarly, John Allspaw started high in his talk—sharing his ideas on the areas of ownership and specialization between Ops and Dev, a typical DevOps presentation—but backs up the theory with code-level discussions of how logging, metrics, and monitoring works at Etsy.  (His blog entry on the subject and complete Qcon slides can be found on his blog, Kitchen Soap.)

Adrian Cockroft, who is leading a trailblazing public cloud deployment of production-level applications at Netflix, also wrapped theory around juicy substance. He “showed the code” and the screenshots of his company’s app scaling and monitoring tools (you can find his complete slide presentation here).

Not everyone took the time to drill down, though. Tweets from QCon attendees showed that the natives got restless in talks that stayed too high level:

“OK, just because you can draw a block diagram out of something doesn’t mean it makes sense.”

“Ok, we get it. Your company is very interesting, now get to the nerd stuff.”

“These sessions are high-level narratives. Show me the code, guys! Devil’s in the details.”

At the same time, they would shower plaudits and congratulations on speakers who gave them what they wanted: something new to learn.

When the Twitter stream started to compare QCon’s activities with an event happening concurrently in the city, Cloud Expo, the nature of the attendees was draw into sharp relief:

“At #cloudexpo people used laptops during sessions to check email… At #qconsf they are writing code.”

When it comes to agile, SOA, DevOps, and other problems of the day, people are ready for answers.

APM Thought Leadership, cloud computing, developers, DevOps, IT operations

AppDynamics is founded on a set of deeply held beliefs regarding our industry and how it’s changed over the last several years.  But it’s never good to let deeply held beliefs stay unchallenged.  So every now and then, we do a reality check.

Our most recent reality check was during our webinar presentation of AppDynamics 3.0. We attracted hundreds of IT ops and dev professionals who wanted to learn both about our solution as well as the specific features of our new release—so we took the opportunity to poll them and ask them a few questions. First, we asked if they operated in a SOA environment:

AppDynamics believes that applications are increasingly moving to SOA, turning monolithic web architectures from the early 2000s into obsolete antiques.  As you can see, that belief was confirmed; the vast majority of our webinar attendees have already entered that world.

Then we asked if they followed an agile development approach:

Again, the vast majority of attendees have embraced agile—in fact, nearly 50% release new features or capabilities at least monthly!  Only 8% report that they follow the traditional, waterfall approach to development. With those kinds of tumultuous deadlines, AppDynamics remains impressed that these hardy souls were actually able to take enough time out of their schedule to watch our presentation.

Finally, we wanted to know the punch line: what’s the effect of all this change on their ability to manage application performance?

Over half were really feeling the crunch, and only a scant few had escaped unscathed.

It’s not that AppDynamics enjoys the pain of others. (We don’t. Really.)  But having our fundamental beliefs confirmed—that the world of applications has changed, and application management solutions need to change with them—simply lets us know that we exist for the right reasons.

Take the example of one of our most recent customers, TiVo.  Operating in a highly distributed environment, TiVo has hundreds of individual Java and proprietary applications, designed to work together to deliver service to its customers.

“We used to spend hours troubleshooting issues,” Richard Rothschild, Senior Director of IT, told us.  “If a service was running slowly and we didn’t know the cause, finding that root cause was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

He continued, “We used to spend up to 6 hours on root cause. AppDynamics brought that time down to ten minutes.  We’ve already seen a big improvement in the reliability and uptime of our services—anything that simplifies our job in this complex environment makes us feel much more confident about taking on new business projects.”

It’s complicated out there, and with the advent of cloud and virtual environments, it’s not getting any easier. But we went into this business in order to simplify application performance management and support application teams in their quest for both performance and availability.  So far, it looks like we chose the right reasons to exist.

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics, cloud computing, IT operations, SOA

Taking a break from the rush of activity at VMWorld, today we released the results of our first Application Virtualization Outlook survey.  With virtualization a top priority for many CIOs in the next year, we wanted to hear from IT professionals about their plans to virtualize mission-critical apps. Most importantly, we wanted to learn how quickly they’re making the transition, or whether there are obstacles getting in their way.

We found the survey results pretty interesting – overall, it seems like many application owners recognize the potential benefits of virtualization, but lack the confidence that their Tier-1 apps will continue to perform as needed when moved to a virtual environment. Let’s take a closer look at a few of these results and how we came to this conclusion:

More than 80 percent of professionals polled had virtualized their non-critical systems, but on the flip side, only 14 percent had virtualized more than three quarters or more of their Tier 1 apps (see charts below).  That’s a big divide in the pace of adoption.

The number one obstacle to virtualizing apps? “People Issues,” i.e., application owners who impede the virtualization process.  Respondents also cited worries about performance degradation and application design.

And one of our favorite questions- almost one-third of respondents reported that there are people in their organization who would say, “My Tier 1 application will be virtualized over my dead body!!”  This definitely proves that application virtualization is can elicit an emotional response in concerned application owners.

But, let’s not get discouraged. Just about everyone surveyed agreed that there are some great benefits to be had with virtualization. In particular, respondents noted that server consolidation, power and cost savings were likely payoffs, along with disaster recovery and agility improvements.

So how can virtualization teams assuage the concerns of their colleagues and reap these benefits? By providing hard evidence that the owners’ application will perform well in a virtual environment.

Application owners are responsible for meeting SLAs and for maintaining 100% up-time – and they’re not going to hand over their application without proof that those business objectives won’t be compromised.

The best way to get these facts is to conduct tests to establish a baseline performance in a non-virtual environment, and then provide a comparison of application performance, pre-and post-virtualization.  This “apples-to-apples” strategy presents app owners with evidence that their application will continue to perform to their high standards in a virtual environment.

For more information about how we help companies manage application performance in virtual environments, check this out.

APM Thought Leadership, application monitoring, cloud computing, virtualization