When I joined AppDynamics less than a year ago, we were situated in a 6,000 sq ft “cozy” office on 2nd and Brannan. On my first day I was greeted with a MacBook Pro and was asked to find a spare desk amongst the boxes and carnage of a typical startup environment. To my left was a relentless engineering and UI team, and to my right was a fired up sales and marketing team, and a quietly confident Founder and CEO, Jyoti Bansal who made all of this happen. Across the office was a shiny gold bell mounted on the wall, which rang every time AppDynamics closed a new customer. In the last year I can honestly say that shiny bell hasn’t stopped ringing, and is the biggest adrenaline boost one can get while working.

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apm, appdynamics, AppDynamics Funding, appdynamics lite, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware Dynatrace, Dynatrace, HP BAC, HP Diagnostics, IBM, Kleiner Perkins, New Relic

2011 was an amazing year for AppDynamics. We experienced tremendous growth and success, largely down to the many customers around the world who believed in our vision, technology, and ability to help Dev and Ops teams better manage application performance in production. The Application Performance Management (APM) market isn’t an easy market to succeed in, with well over 30 vendors competing against each other. In just three years we’ve managed to take on the big players like Compuware DynaTrace, CA Wily, HP and IBM to change the industry perception that APM is expensive to own and difficult to deploy/use.

We feel APM should be for everyone. It should be affordable, it should be easy to deploy, and easy to use. APM should not be a luxury that only an elite group of enterprises can afford. Today, we have customers who monitor applications with 5 nodes, 50 nodes, 500 nodes and 5,000 nodes. Application performance impacts organizations of all sizes; that’s why we wanted our APM solution to be accessible to the masses over the web via our free download and SaaS trial. We wanted to be transparent with our buyers and demonstrate that they can evaluate and use our solution all by themselves with no account manager or technical consultant by their side. We really wanted prospects to see for themselves that APM can be simple to deploy and easy to use.

A major validation of this market disruption was when a customer called Karavel in France was looking for an APM solution and evaluated CA Wily, Compuware dynaTrace and AppDynamics. Karavel requested a trial, downloaded our software and we sent them a trial license key for 30 days. The whole AppDynamics install, deployment and evaluation was solely conducted by the customer on their own. This might not sound that impressive, but this is what the software buying experience should be all about: the customer and the solution. If the customer can’t install, deploy and evaluate an APM solution on their own, how will they manage this process when it comes to a production deployment? Software should sell itself these days–if it requires an army of people to sell it, it probably requires an army of people to implement it as well.

You can read the full Karavel press release here:
http://www.appdynamics.com/press/press-release-01-03-12.php

Full case study is available here also:
http://www.appdynamics.com/documents/roi_studies/AppDynamics_ROI_Karavel.pdf

Remember, software like APM doesn’t have to be complex and expensive. With the internet these days, there is no excuse why a prospect can’t download or evaluate solutions online in just a few hours.

App Man.

apm, appdynamics, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, HP BAC, IBM ITCAM, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Quest Foglight

We recently finished conducting our annual Application Performance Management survey. Over 250 IT professionals participated, and they shared insights such as:
- Many Ops and Dev teams are anticipating growth in their applications by 20% or more
- Over 50% are planning to move to the cloud, and are architecting brand-new applications to be cloud-ready
- Most teams are using log files to monitor application performance, rather than an Application Performance Management (APM) tool.

We’ll release the full report soon, but here’s an infographic that summarizes some of the main findings:

Embed this image on your site:
<a href="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/2011/12/14/storm-clouds-in-2012-summary-of-appdynamics-apm-customer-survey" title="AppDynamics Application Performance Management"><br /> <img src="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AppDynamics_infographic_2011_survey.jpg" alt="AppDynamics Application Performance Management" /></a><br /> <br/>Source: <a href="http://www.appdynamics.com" title="AppDynamics Application Performance Management Tools">AppDynamics: Application Monitoring Company</a><br/>

What I found personally surprising was the heavy reliance on log files. When you’re troubleshooting distributed architectures, time is of the essence–and there’s no way to cut your MTTR down when you’re relying on log files to identify root cause.

In fact, there’s only one guy who ever made using a log file look cool:

And I think we can all agree that’s a pretty unique use case.

We’ll have the full survey results available soon.

Agile & DevOps, apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, BTM, CA Wily, cloud, Compuware, DevOps, Dynatrace, HP BAC, IaaS, infographic, MTTR, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Performance Issues, Problem Resolution, Quest, Splunk

The majority of us in IT are specialists, with the exception of a few VPs of engineering who are “special” in their own “special” world of being “special.” What I mean by this is that no single person has the skills or experience to do everything well in IT. IT is too big for me to explain or summarize in a few words, other than it requires a lot of different people with different skills to make it tick along. Despite applications being the living breathing entities of the business, a large portion of folk in IT have little context of how applications are built, how they execute, and how they consume resource across the IT infrastructure. Many people simply don’t care as their responsibilities are completely void of anything application related. That’s fine–but the reality is that everyone in IT should have one eye on the business. The whole reason IT exists is so the business can be more competitive and make more money. If this happens, IT gets more budget and is allowed to innovate more. IT and the business need each other to survive, which is why when applications slow down or break, both parties bitch at each other.

Operations need better visibility

Unfortunately for both the business and IT, the people (Operations) who manage the performance and availability of applications in production aren’t application experts. They are also not stupid either; their skills sets are wide and broad across many technologies and platforms that underpin applications. They manage a lot of things that application developers take for granted, like networks, databases, storage and virtualization. While Operations monitor the health of these infrastructure components, they often get bombarded with crap from the business when end users and business transactions are being impacted by slow performance, despite all system monitoring showing everything is fine. This lack of understanding between the Business and Operations is because both parties see things from different perspectives.

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apm, appdynamics, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transactions, CA Wily, Compuware, DevOps, Dynatrace, HP BAC, IBM Tivoli, Nastel, OpNet, OpTier