A week has passed since we officially launched our free version of AppDynamics Lite for .NET to the public, and so far its been garnering attention and positive reviews from the APM community. For example, someone from a major Canadian telecommunications company downloaded .NET Lite and informed us on how quickly they were able to gain value from using it.

We’re equally impressed and delighted that they’re heavily pushing our Lite product internally and on the path to becoming an AppDynamics Pro user. Even though we hear praises from customers often, it’s always satisfying to hear about our products delivering real, quantifiable results in under 24 hours.

We also received this blog review from another .NET Lite user just the other day. They deployed AppDynamics Lite to monitor their overall site performance called Everymarket.ru – an open e-commerce market that connects resellers with a community of buyers for products that are discounted when purchased in bulk. The users of Lite are also able to monitor the outbound web service calls to VK.com which is Russia’s version of Facebook to ensure outbound requests to the social site are responsive.

EveryMarket.ru Describes the Entire .NET Lite Experience

AppDynamics Lite looks nice and catchy. Right after installation we started to obtain information about our application and performance metrics immediately. The following screenshot nicely illustrates that there are some hidden errors occurring for three of the business transactions in the following list. We have actually seen these errors before, but it was quite hard to estimate their frequency and severity. Now it can be easily understood from this view here and on the Business Transactions view, though it is limited to only 20 transactions.

The first thing I did after the installation, I decreased the snapshot frequency from 100 to 50. It was more out of curiosity without much purpose. It’s nice to see the historical information about errors and requests presented on one screen. We then changed the default sorting “By timestamp” in order to see errors as they happened by recency.

In this case, the error in question didn’t involve a SQL query. The Bad Request details were quite simple and repeated what we could find in a set of stack trace logs. However, the main advantage for us is that AppDynamics can catch these errors and notify our team immediately by email. Once inside the tool, the information is well organized for faster root cause diagnosis.

In general I found it very useful that AppDynamics operates with business transaction logic. The semantic of transaction is easy to understand and one can have a detailed overview of a precise transaction. And of course the “red bar” matters. In case of many errors it is straightforward that “more red” means “look first”.

From two examples you can see that our .NET Lite users are able to install and run our product with ease while gaining insight into their application’s health and performance bottlenecks to improve upon for faster runtime. If you have a success story using AppDynamics Lite, please let us know!

.NET Applications, .NET Monitoring, apm, AppDynamics Lite for .NET, Application Performance Management, Customer Success, IIS Monitoring

“Support from AppDynamics is the best I’ve ever received from any vendor. Once again, you’ve met your norm. Thank you for the excellence so many other vendors no longer offer.”   -AppDynamics Customer

If you’ve been following our blogs regularly, you might have noticed we enjoy highlighting quantifiable benefits our customers have gained from using AppDynamics to manage their critical business applications in production. We take pride in their successes – and their success helps not only their organization, but also their personal careers as well. So in today’s blog, I’d like to highlight some of the top-notch work our Customer Success team does.

1. Service Quality and Value
2. Proactive Engagement
3. Timely Resolution

Service Quality and Value

First, AppDynamics’ Customer Success team benchmarks our customer loyalty a few times each year. One of the benchmarking techniques we use is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). You can take a look here for further explanation, but basically the technique boils down to the answer to one simple question – “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [Company/Product X] to a friend or colleague?” We like this technique, because it is a very challenging standard – any score less than 9 is considered a bad result.

In our most recent survey, we were pleased by all of the positive and candid responses we received from our customers. Turns out our average score is a solid 9+ yielding us a reputable General Satisfaction NPS of 73.5% and a Customer Support Satisfaction NPS of 73.08%. This ranks us even above the poster child of technology companies such as Apple. It’s a commendable achievement, but we aren’t resting on our laurels.

AppDynamics NPS vs NPS Leaders of 2012

Having an NPS rating is a great start for measuring your company’s performance, but for AppDynamics it’s not enough. We also measure ticket resolution times and overall customer satisfaction, this is done via frequent online surveys to ensure no stone is left unturned.

AppDynamics comprises some of the brightest computer scientists and APM rockstars. Thus, it’s in our nature to approach customer satisfaction from a binary perspective. It’s true or false. In the case of customer satisfaction, it’s either “Good” or “Bad”. 99% of our customer responses are marked as “Good” and for the 1% that aren’t, our support team is committed to helping these customers until their issues are resolved properly and they’re fully satisfied.

Proactive Engagement

When it comes to being proactive it’s not just our software that stays ahead of the curve but also our support team that remains engaged every step of the way through effective and rapid resolution. Below are just some examples:

One customer identified a performance issue in their application but were unsure of which remediation was best. Our support team looked at the performance issue and suggested the optimal JVM settings which resulted in 5% improvement in overall application performance for the customer.

Another customer had an incident during their peak traffic time where their servers were periodically hanging, and at the time they weren’t using our product. Once again, using the superhero capabilities of AppDynamics, the support team discovered that they were doing too many minor garbage collections, which was hurting their JVM performance during primetime. This was an issue that had been plaguing their business for three months.

AppDynamics support not only told them where and what the issue was, but also found a number of other issues that which could have lead to serious performance problems in the future such as: slow running queries, a native logger was taking too long to log a message and an inefficient resultset iteration.

Timely Resolution

If you’re a customer and you contact AppDynamics support, you should expect no less than excellent customer support. If your ticket is urgent, our SLAs require that we respond under 4 hours. Zendesk actually released some benchmarks as to how we measure up against the software industry and other companies as a whole. Take a look.

Benchmark Metrics produced by Zendesk based on data from 80 million tickets

But don’t just take our word for it, take a look at what some of our customers have said about our Customer Support team:

“Customer Support is very prompt and to the point answers.”

“Timely. Personnel desire to be helpful”

“Very quick and responsive. Far and above other vendors I deal with.” 

“Quick answer. Very good service. Thanks!”

“They have been very responsive and in cases proactive.” 

“Great follow through getting a solution to my production issue quickly.”  

“Excellent, timely and effective“

“Very responsive”

“Excellent. All the necessary items were discussed and resolved in a timely manner“

“Excellent speed and accuracy”

” 10 on 10!!! Very quick and to the point responses”

apm, Application Performance Management, Customer Success