On the day that AppDynamics announced their APMaaS (yep, APM as a Service) offering for MSP’s (Managed Service Providers) the Compuware marketing team took to the twitterverse to let the world know how ridiculous it is to describe your offering in such plain terms. Here are a few of the exceptionally creative tweets attacking the complete lack of marketing lies and immorality displayed by the goody two shoes at AppDynamics…

 Ben Grubin was so pleased with his initial tweet that he decided to tweet almost the same thing twice more…

In related news, AppDynamics doesn’t actually have a product named APMaaS in a box. Instead it’s actually a description of the offering we are using to replace Compuware and other APM vendors at MSP’s. I don’t think anyone can really fault these marketing professionals for their lack of reading comprehension, so we’ll just chalk it up to an honest mistake and move on.

We’d like to thank Compuware for paying us such attention and reading our announcements, its flattering for a company like AppDynamics that has only been selling APM for three years.

AppDynamics vs Compuware, Compuware, Compuware Dynatrace, Compuware Gomez, Compuware Vantage, Dynatrace

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

A new year, a new iPhone and a new quarter. What else is new? How about a new company?

Last month I was fortunate enough to join a stellar marketing team at one of the fastest growing enterprise software startups in the bay area. The company you ask? AppDynamics, and did I mention we’re also the leading next generation Application Performance Management (APM) provider for modern architectures in distributed, cloud, virtualized and on-premise environments? We exceeded our targets for 2011 achieving an astonishing 400% growth in bookings. Not too shabby for being the new kid on the block in a competitive market already inundated with vendors. You have old school APM tools from megavendors like CA, HP and Compuware (was dynaTrace). Then you have the new school breed such as New Relic and AppDynamics. In fact, Gartner’s MQ lists over twenty vendors. So with such a crowded market why did I even consider such a move?

Well there’s a laundry list of reasons, but here are the top ones that come to mind.

1. Business Innovation. This is another kind of BI not just Business Intelligence. It’s really a breath of fresh air to be working with an organization that is not only obsessed with pumping out insanely great technology every few quarters or so, but also open to embracing innovative approaches to every discipline of the business including creative marketing and sales strategies. Often times enterprise software companies unabashedly attempt to cloak themselves in slideware selling a “vision” or an enterprise solution poles apart from reality. Unfortunately when it comes down to an actual evaluation, you end up having to attend a dozen meetings just to see an applicable demo, a one week to two month proof-of-concept followed by throwing millions of dollars at consulting and implementation services, which segues to my next point.

2. Ease-of-Use. This simple yet powerful concept has been repeatedly neglected or intentionally ignored by many enterprise software companies. Luckily, the Leaders of the New School such as Apple, Salesforce, Box, etc. (not Busta Rhymes group) have changed the way end users value an intuitive user interface and design. At AppDynamics, we’ve adopted a similar mindshare. “Easy” is the new world order in this industry because the managers, engineers and folks in IT operations are encountering enough complexity as it is with these modern architectures. I doubt the last thing that they want is another tool to further complicate their lives causing more frustration on the job. At the end of the day everyone is a consumer – the least common denominator – who wants to use software that helps us demystify our lives and makes us successful at our jobs (unless you’re a sadist).

Software that is easy to install, implement and use can have a tremendous impact on the bottom-line of a business. Suppose you end up rolling out a new system but end up having to spend a chunk of company change on implementation and training costs. What impact does that have on your productivity and ultimately your company’s bottom-line? Here’s an example from Avon’s Q3, 2011 earnings transcript,

“Despite extensive pre-implementation testing, we had greater than anticipated implementation challenges in the go-live. Significantly higher business complexity in this market contributed to a greater than expected level of disruption, as I said, when we went to the go-live environment.”

Many vendors make enterprise deployments akin to embarking on an IT version of manifest destiny. I’m sure you can think of a few applications in your own IT toolbox that fit the bill where at some point you ended up asking yourself, “Why can’t this be as easy as [fill in the blank with some consumer app]?”  Fig. 2. See empathetic frustrated user to your left.

That was compelling enough for me to join AppDynamics. We truly understand the business significance as to why software ought to be easy 360 degrees around especially in production. I’m not saying that the work designers and developers have to do to achieve this “Easy” goal is easy in itself. I have an unrequited love for the folks in engineering who possess the talent and perseverance in coding applications, but that doesn’t excuse a vendor from selling you a dream and then leaving you stranded to implement a nightmare all because there wasn’t enough emphasis on ease-of-use.

3. Application Performance. This one is near and dear to my heart and arguably the main reason for me to join AppDynamics. It takes me back to the challenging days and sleepless nights I endured while working on a massive global PDM implementation at LG Electronics jointly with Dassault Systemes. The year was 2008. Skynet hadn’t become self-aware yet. App Man was just A Man in the throes and woes of IT operations, and half way around the world over in Seoul, Korea I was managing juggling recurring performance issues on a weekly basis with our PMO having to answer to the beck and call of the LGE CIO. The project’s launch date had been delayed due to various complications with the implementation (that’s a whole other story). Any ideas what one of those might have entailed? If you guessed “performance”, congratulations! You’ve won! Download your free copy AppDynamics Lite.

Every week new customizations were being released from R&D back in the states, PS in Korea and SI’s sitting on the other side of the room. You could call it Agile development’s nemesis, frAgile development. The dynamic nature of our java-based environment only introduced more challenges to the performance team who were heads-down trying to reverse engineer someone else’s code and refactor it using APM tools that just didn’t provide us with the full visibility we needed to comprehensively profile and diagnose application performance issues (using JenniferSoft). In fact, one of the consultants on our team ended up creating his own profiler to expose these blind spots, but what we really needed was a next-generation APM tool that would visually map and connect the dots for us like the one below.

Then we ran into another stumbling block after we completed migrating legacy data to a new “production” environment. When the time came to retest the entire set of performance use cases in this new environment we experienced all kinds of performance regressions. Since everyone was collaborating so well with each other for over the past two years, we all cheerfully marched forward without any finger pointing as to what the root cause was. Ok, so it wasn’t that utopian. Fortunately, because of everyone’s undying commitment and personal sacrifices, the project went live successfully in mid 2010 with over 2,000 users visiting the system per day. In hindsight, we could have easily saved a month’s worth had we used a better tool thereby eliminating the usual suspects.

From that experience I’ve come to appreciate and understand how business-critical managing application performance is for any company. Now I am on a mission to spread the word of AppDynamics to help companies manage rapidly evolving, distributed environments.

Buckle up 2012, we’re just getting started.

Agile Development, App Man, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Ease-of-Use, HP, JenniferSoft, New Relic