Some companies talk about monitoring their end user experience and other companies take the bull by the horns and get it done. For those who have successfully implemented EUM (RUM, EUEM, or whatever your favorite acronym is) the technology is rewarding for both the company and the end user alike. I recently had the opportunity to discuss AppDynamics EUM with one of our customers and the information shared with me was exciting and gratifying.

The Environment

ManpowerGroup monitors their intranet and internet applications with AppDynamics. These applications are used for internal operations as well as customer facing websites; in support of their global business and accessed from around the word, 24×7. We’re talking about business critical, revenue generating applications!

I asked Fred Graichen, Manager of Enterprise Application Support, why he thought ManpowerGroup needed EUM.

“One of the key components for EUM is to shed light on what is happening in the “last mile”. Our business involves supporting branch locations. Having an EUM tool allows us to compare performance across all of our branches. This also helps us determine whether any performance issues are localized. Having the insight into the difference in performance by location allows us to make more targeted investments in local hardware and network infrastructure.”

Meaningful Results

Turning on a monitoring tool doesn’t mean you’ll automagically get the results you want. You also need to make sure your tool is integrated with your people, processes, and technologies. That’s exactly what ManpowerGroup has done with AppDynamics EUM. They have alerts based upon EUM metrics that get routed to the proper people. They are then able to correlate the EUM information with data from other (Network) monitoring tools in their root cause analysis. Below is an EUM screen shot from ManpowerGroup’s environment.

By implementing AppDynamics EUM, ManpowerGroup has been able to:

• Identify locations that are experiencing the worst performance.
• Successfully illustrate the difference in performance globally as well. (This is key when studying the impact of latency etc. on an application that is being accessed from other countries but are located in a central datacenter.)
• Quickly identify when a certain location is seeing performance issues and correlate that with data from other monitoring solutions.

But what does all of this mean to the business? It means that ManpowerGroup has been able to find and resolve problems faster for their customers and employees. Faster application response time combined with happier customers and more productive employees all contribute to a healthier bottom line for ManpowerGroup.

ManpowerGroup is using AppDynamics EUM to bring a higher level of performance to it’s employees, customers, and shareholders. Sign up for a free trial today and begin your journey to a healthier bottom line.

AppDynamics EUM, End User Monitoring, EUM, Real User Monitoring, RUM

Round Two – Last time I wrote a blog comparing APM versus network-based APM tools, which I still consider NPM at it’s core regardless of what some critics and competitors claim. Let me make one thing clear though, NPM is great for equipping IT network administrators to see how fast or slow data is traveling through the pipes of their application. Unfortunately, network-based APM tools simply cannot provide App Ops granular visibility into the application runtime when isolating bottlenecks go beyond the system level and it’s final destination – the end user’s browser.

I find several of the blogs and YouTube clips from such NPM vendors quite comical as they try to throw punches at APM companies. Their arguments are centered primarily against agent-based approaches being an inadequate APM solution due to today’s fickle and distributed application architectures. It’s not like I haven’t heard it before.

The amusing thing about it…they’re completely right! In fact, we couldn’t agree more, and that’s why Jyoti Bansal founded AppDynamics to address these perennial shortcomings legacy APM vendors have been ignoring. Even the smallest businesses next to the largest enterprises have complex applications that have outpaced their App Ops teams’ current set of monitoring tools. That’s why AppDynamics is reinventing and reigniting the application performance management space by enabling IT operations to monitor complex, modern applications running in the cloud or the data center. So let me respond to those claims they’ve made.

The Claims

“Agents have high deployment and ongoing maintenance burden.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. No manual instrumentation required. It’s automatic.

“Agents are invasive which can perturb the systems being monitored.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. Our customers see less than 1-2% overhead in production. 

“Performance management vendors have over promised and under delivered for decades.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. Things are going well thanks. Check our customer list and 400% growth.

All AppDynamics. The next-gen of APM.

Example FedEx App with application performance issues

I drew a parallel in my previous post that using NPM concepts to monitor application performance is like inspecting Fedex packages en-route to figure out why operations at a hub came to a screeching halt. Remember, even if the package contents is visible from afar, it doesn’t explain why the hub conveyors, which electronically guide packages to their appropriate destination chute is broken, nor can it identify why cargo operations have stalled. In other words, good luck trying to gather anything beyond the scope of the application’s infrastructure. Using network monitoring tools to collect even the most basic system health metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, thread pool consumption and thrashing? Time to throw in the towel.

And what about End User Monitoring?

What’s becoming just as important as being able to monitor server side processing and network time is the ability to monitor end user performance. When NPM tools are only able to see the last packet sent from the server, how does that help you understand the browser’s performance? It doesn’t since once again, this kind of analysis is only feasible higher up the stack at the Application Layer. And just to clarify when I say Application Layer, I mean application execution time, not “network process time to application” as defined by OSI Layer 7.

On the other hand, injected agents residing in that layer can insert JavaScript into the Web page to determine the execution time spent in the browser. This is becoming more of a concern for App Ops and Dev Ops now that 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend executing JavaScript, rendering markup and stylesheets. As business logic continues it’s migration to the browser while increasing it’s processing burden, the client is looking more and more like the new server. Network monitoring tools must move to an agent-based approach if they are to truly deliver the monitoring visibility needed for the application and end user experience, otherwise their visibility will remain between a rock and a hard place.

On top of that, what about those customers running their applications in a public cloud? Are you going to convince your cloud provider to install a network appliance into their infrastructure? I highly doubt it. With AppDynamics, we have partnerships with cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Azure, RightScale and Opsource allowing developers and operations to easily deploy AppDynamics with a flick of a switch and monitor their applications in production 24/7.

Once again, next-gen APM triumphs over NPM based application performance on not just the server side, but also the browser. AppDynamics is embracing this and fully aware of the technical and business significance of monitoring end user performance. We’re delighted to offer this kind of end-to-end visibility to our customers who will now be able to monitor application performance from the end users’ browser to the backend application tiers (databases, mainframes), all through a single pane of glass view.

apm, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, End User Monitoring, EUM, Gartner, Network Monitoring, NPM

Surprised? I guess not. It’s not like the the APM market was in desperate need of another End User Monitoring (EUM) solution right? However, before you assume this announcement is just pure marketing spin – it’s worth taking a few minutes out to understand why the EUM solution AppDynamics has brought to the market is WAY different than the rest.

A good place to begin is with our mission – deliver maximum monitoring visibility thru minimal effort. Everything we do and deliver has to work out-of-the-box for our customers, and it has to install in minutes and be intuitive enough so anyone in IT can exploit its benefits. With this in mind, we simply added EUM as a feature to AppDynamics Pro – our market leading application performance management (APM) solution for modern distributed applications. Rather than burden our customers with another agent, another product, another UI and another license fee, we decided to make it really simple and attractive for organizations to deploy and experience APM and End User Monitoring.

Free, I hear you say? Surely, free means that your new EUM solution isn’t very valuable? Wrong.

APM Must be Affordable for Everyone

Have you ever bought a new car and got really upset when you look at the spec you want, and see a bunch of options which have added several thousands to the final invoice?  You have one price for the car and a price for every option along with costs on top for servicing and maintenance. This buying experience is almost identical to how organizations buy APM solutions from vendors today with multiple products, plugins and support contracts.

Cost of purchase, deployment and ownership are becoming key considerations for APM buyers. AppDynamics thought it would be a bit cheeky to charge for what is essentially a feature or dimension of APM given hundreds of customers have already invested in AppDynamics Pro. Free is also great value when you consider than AppDynamics now provides all 5 dimensions of APM in a single, integrated and scalable solution, which can be delivered on-premise or as a service (SaaS).

Same Product, Same Secret Sauce, New Visibility

Our new EUM solution works out-of-the-box. The good news is that it’s the same box that our Transaction Profiling, Performance Analytics, Application Mapping and Deep Diagnostics comes out of. That means a single product, user interface, install and deployment but now with extended performance monitoring visibility across End Users, Geographies and Browsers.

For example, here is one of the cool features in our EUM solution which shows a geographical SLA view of End User Experience for a given application. Each bubble represents the End User Experience for a given country; the size of the bubble is relative to business transaction volume, and the color is relative to SLA of the user experience (green good, red bad).

It’s now possible to view the real End User response time for all business transactions in an application – in terms of the browser, network and server-side latency contribution.

We also now visualize the End User and network time as part of Application and Business Transactions flows as shown below.

Exploiting EUM data with Performance Analytics

Key ingredients of the AppDynamics secret sauce is our behavioral learning and analytics technology, which can automatically discover and learn the normal performance of every business transaction in an application. This is very important so that AppDynamics Pro captures the right data at the right time, thus ensuring the APM user gets quality of information over quantity. Our new EUM data now feeds our real-time analytics engine so that End User, Browser and network metrics can be dynamically baselined so that AppDynamics can understand what the normal End User Experience really is. This ensures the alerts we send are highly accurate and relevant, ensuring that operations is the first to know of End User issues rather than the last to know via hate mail or angry phone calls.

Support for Modern Web 2.0 and Cloud Applications

Just like application architectures have evolved with SOA, Cloud and Big Data technologies – we’re starting to see plenty evolution in how the user interfaces are being delivered. In the good old days you had JavaServerPages and ActiveServerPages combined with some CSS and perhaps a dash of JavaScript if you dared. The user experience was static, synchronous, repetitive, slow and if I’m honest, pretty dull at times relative to what we have today.

The way you monitored the End User Experience back then was to either monitor the Server (which is pretty much where all the logic was) or the network using concepts like packet capture via a network appliance. Unfortunately today, the likes of Amazon EC2, RackSpace and Windows Azure won’t let you rock up to their data center, wheel out a network appliance, and hook it up to one of their span ports or network taps. By all means you can try, but you might be waiting a long time.

Today, application logic is moving from the Server to the Browser to offer a more interactive and slick user experience, leveraging asynchronous event driven communication and a range of browser plugins (i.e. Adobe Flash & Microsoft Silverlight) as well as web toolkit frameworks (GWT, Dojo, JQuery). Application logic in the browser means more processing occurs on the client, and more processing means more latency–which can obviously impact the end user experience. It was therefore imperative for AppDynamics to be able to monitor this latency for modern web 2.0 and Cloud Applications. That’s why we came up with an innovative way to make it happen.

How does AppDynamics EUM work?

AppDynamics went with a web page script injection agent for EUM so we could get complete browser visibility and see the REAL End User Experience. It allows us to dynamically monitor the End User Experience for any application in any location with no code changes, network appliances or configuration. If you’ve installed AppDynamics Lite or Pro, you’ll know how easy it is to be installed and deployed in minutes. And we had to follow the same principles for our EUM agent, otherwise this capability would never be adopted in large, complex and highly dynamic environments. We also made our EUM architecture and implementation truly scalable for enterprise applications that have billions of business transactions running through them everyday across thousands of application tiers. If our EUM solution wasn’t scalable, it wouldn’t matter how good it was–it would never end up being adopted by our customers.

In fact, we’ve already had some amazing early customer success with AppDynamics EUM. Check out today’s press release, which has quotes from both Fox News and Colorado State University.

If you want to try AppDynamics in your organization you can register here for a 30-day free trial.

App Man.

AppDynamics Pro, End User Experience Monitoring, End User Monitoring, EUEM, EUM, Real User Monitoring, RUM