It’s a big day for us here at AppDynamics as we mark (and pass!) the 5000th download of AppDynamics Lite! Released just a few months ago, AppDynamics Lite is our free APM tool for troubleshooting Java performance in production.  We hear every day from companies who have deployed Lite in production environments and are using it to solve real problems.  That’s why we built it, and it’s very rewarding to hear about IT Operations professionals and developers getting real value.

This conversation represents another goal of ours: removing the friction that typically exists between software companies and evaluators. With Lite, companies can download it whenever they want and put it immediately into action.  No waiting, no negotiating…just instant access.  This strategy works for us because, as a startup, we believe that if someone becomes familiar with our solution, they’ll see that it’s considerably better than the legacy offerings on the market.

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, application monitoring, cloud computing, developers, DevOps

Interested in winning an iPad? Take our Application Virtualization survey, and we’ll give you a more-than-decent shot at winning your very own!

In talking to our customers, AppDynamics recognizes that virtualizing mission-critical applications is at the top of everyone’s mind, even though some companies are at different stages of the process than others.

Many IT departments have already finished virtualizing their less critical apps and they realize that there are many benefits to be had in virtualizing the rest. But, in many cases, application owners are concerned about performance impacts to their mission-critical apps, and they’re saying, “Hands off my app.”

What’s it like at your organization? Is the path to app virtualization a smooth one, or are you experiencing some bumps along the way? We’d like to find out more, and we’d like your help to do it.

Answer a few short questions on your app virtualization strategy and be automatically entered to win an iPad. In addition, we’ll send you a copy of the results, so you can discover what your peers at other organizations are doing.

Find out:

- What percentage of Tier 1 apps have been virtualized by other companies
- Whether the virtualization project is a stepping stone towards the cloud
- What challenges are preventing people from finishing (or even starting) virtualization of Tier 1 apps

The survey is only 10 questions long–and again, entering gives you the possibility of winning an iPad, as well as a guaranteed copy of the survey results.

Take the survey now!

We look forward to reviewing your responses!

APM Thought Leadership, application, application development, cloud computing, virtualization

Last week we hosted a presentation by AppDynamics customer, Priceline, along with an informative customer roundtable on application performance. During our roundtable, we polled the audience on their challenges with application performance – we asked questions about their architectures, development philosophies, common performance problems, downtime and visibility. Roughly 100 attendees from companies big and small responded.

The results were interesting. Here’s a look at what we found:

When asked about performance challenges, 88% of respondents noted they’ve experienced application performance problems in the last 12 months. The most common performance issues cited were Slow Response, Stalls, Errors and Memory Leaks. (Stay tuned this August for our upcoming blog series on what you should know about the Top 5 App Performance Challenges).

Additionally, 67% of respondents said they struggled to determine the root cause of their application performance problem in a timely manner, and roughly 33% responded that end-users called the helpdesk to complain about poor online experiences. Surprisingly, only 42% of participants admitted that they’ve experienced production downtime.

When asked to share some information about their application environments, participants responded that:

• 73% have a multi-tier, distributed application
• 70% leverage both open source and commercial application infrastructure (i.e. app servers)
• 52% say they follow an agile development philosophy
• 82% said that they lack visibility in key areas of their application

For the most part, we weren’t surprised by these answers. We hear from our customers everyday that they are shifting toward SOA, virtualization and cloud computing infrastructures. These responses also confirmed our experience that many organizations have built JBoss and Tomcat into their application architectures, whereas five years ago most companies would primarily have had WebLogic or WebSphere.

Its also not surprising that such a large number of respondents had experienced issues with performance. Distributed applications, especially those that use a mix of open source and proprietary components, are extremely difficult to monitor and troubleshoot. They often contain blind spots that result in critical performance problems.

Nor was it surprising that the majority of companies lack visibility into their applications. This is the most common refrain we hear when talking to companies for the first time. It doesn’t matter if they are running a $10 billion dollar business or a $10 million dollar business…visibility is always a concern. At the end of the day, “You can’t manage what you can’t see.”

Management really is the kicker. Web-applications have become transaction-oriented and revenue-critical, and it is more important than ever to be able to not only monitor, but quickly diagnose and fix performance issues before they impact your business.

APM Thought Leadership, appdynamics, application development, application monitoring, cloud computing

I recently had a chance to visit the webcast “This Week in Cloud Computing” and share some of my thoughts about cloud trends and application performance management. One thread of the conversation that I found particularly interesting was the discussion of agility in cloud computing. Although this theme comes up from time to time, most discussions I hear on cloud computing focus on cost-cutting and security.

These are extremely important concerns, of course — security in particular can be seen as a prerequisite of any sound cloud computing strategy. But there’s a “forest for the trees” risk in focusing too much on cloud computing pitfalls in lieu of recognizing its benefits, of which agility is certainly a major component.

We’re seeing with our own customers the need to be even more agile than before, of scrums becoming common and engineering stand-ups becoming a way of life. Any process change that helps speed up the application deployment chain is more than just a “nice to have;” it’s a sea change in the ability of companies to deliver value to their end users.

Bernard Golden makes some interesting points about two types of cloud computing agility in this discussion on CIO – definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the topic.

In case you missed the live webcast last week, here’s the video:

APM Thought Leadership, application development, cloud computing, hybrid clouds, public clouds

If you’re thinking about moving to the cloud, you’re not alone.

From what we hear, the majority of IT departments are planning to at least take tentative steps into the cloud. They’re enticed by the promise of elastic computing for mission-critical applications, and they want the ability to only pay for what they need. They’re excited by the prospect of being able to provision for capacity solely when the application requires it, versus the bad economics of always provisioning for peak usage.

As a previous post indicated, this doesn’t mean that people will start throwing their mission-critical apps into production in the cloud. It will be a gradual deployment, starting with private clouds and moving on to hybrid clouds. But it will happen, and in greater numbers.

However, before the cloud becomes your destination, it’s necessary to first master application performance and gain complete visibility into your app. That includes having a correlated understanding of application load/throughput over time, and knowing which tiers and services need to be scaled up or down.

Doing so is the only way to get to a dynamically scaled, close-loop system–which is the end goal of cloud-based applications.

To get there, some homework is required. It’s a 3-step process for most applications to get to the point of a closed-loop system, and it’s not necessarily an easy goal to reach:

Step 1: Get full visibility into the application performance and the performance dynamics of all its moving parts, as well as how they change with load.

Step 2: Gain the ability to automate the provisioning of application services.

Step 3: Acquire the intelligence to combine the above two steps in a closed loop system.

Do steps 1 & 2 before you take your first step into the cloud–then do #3 once you’re in the cloud.

Different organizations will journey through these steps at different rates of speed and efficiency. Some will simply rearchitect their applications, or create them from scratch–but for most, it will take them some time to complete them. For some, it may even take years.

However, it’s necessary to gain visibility into the app before you gain the ability to automate provisioning. And it’s only with automated provisioning–and the intelligence to turn it into a closed-loop system–can you consider deploying the app in new environments.

Just as passing final exams is required before you get a diploma, solving application performance is a pre-requisite for moving into the cloud.

APM Thought Leadership, cloud automation, cloud computing

Most people, thankfully, have acknowledged that the cloud is real.  For groups such as development and testing, it’s not only real, but highly successful; we’re seeing our customers and prospects use the public clouds, or build and deploy private clouds at a much more rapid pace than even a year ago. The real question is this: when will companies starting deploying their complex production environments in the cloud?

Some pundits believe that enterprises will ditch their data centers and move their complex production applications completely into the cloud.  But this is not pragmatic.  We have talked to hundreds of enterprises and the people responsible for their complex production applications.  From these conversations, we have gained a sense of the overarching strategy that many companies are adopting.What we are seeing is a recurring scenario where enterprises move production environments to the cloud–but this migration involves a physical-cloud “hybrid” approach instead of a “pure cloud” approach.

1.  Hybrid Physical-Cloud SOA: The business decides that it needs quick time-to-market for some new functionality, but IT folks can’t procure new machines quickly enough to meet the deadline. The business groups then decide to use the cloud for capacity for the new functionality. These new services in the cloud communicate to and from the existing services and functionality in the data center.

2. Cloud Bursting: Companies using cloud for temporary capacity in case of a spike.  For example, let’s say an eCommerce greeting card company needs 100 machines on Mother’s Day, but doesn’t want to buy them–so they get that capacity temporarily in the cloud.

3.  Cloud Failover: Using the cloud for failover and disaster recovery

We are definitely seeing companies begin to move services to the cloud, but they don’t want to risk critical production apps responsible for $2 billion in revenue. For now, hybrid is the way to go.

But only for now…

cloud computing, hybrid clouds, public clouds