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

On Wednesday I delivered a keynote at WJAX in Munich. Everything went really well, but I was a little shocked at the response I got when I asked the audience “How many of you monitor the performance of your apps in production?” As I scanned the audience, I counted 9 out of ~950 developers had put their hands up, meaning about 1% had visibility of how their applications actually performed in production. I know what you’re thinking: “But isn’t application performance in production the responsibility of Operations?”  Well, it is and it isn’t. Most organizations think that when an application has an issue, it’s related to the infrastructure it runs on. That’s like saying when a car crashes, it’s because a part failed on the car whereas in actual fact most accidents are caused by the driver. Yes, hardware fails occasionally, but application logic and configuration drives how infrastructure resource is used, which is why most issues today occur when new code is deployed in production.

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apm, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, AppDynamics Pro, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, MTTR, Performance Bottlenecks, Production Monitoring, Slow Application, WJAX

If you are running mission-critical applications and do not have a strategy to deal with failure, you are putting your whole organization at risk. You may think that your application cannot fail, but at some point everything fails.  It may not be the software running your application that fails – it could be the hardware, the network, or even a natural disaster in your area that causes your application to go down. In case of such failure, no matter how rare, your customers will still expect the same level of service, not to mention preservation of their data.  Without a failover strategy and a tested backup infrastructure you will be out of service for an unknown period of time, which will lead to angry customers and loss of revenue.

Most of you have some failover strategy in place. I’m sure many of you have spent large amounts of time and money ensuring that your application is resilient to failure because you understand your app’s importance. But you may still be missing one key component, without which you are still at risk. That component is monitoring, or more specifically, Application Performance Management (APM). While mission-critical applications rely on an APM system to help monitor application performance and health, APM is often forgotten on the failover systems. APM needs to goes hand-in-hand with any failure testing plan to ensure that your company’s strategy will work in case of a real emergency.

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apm, Application Performance Management, cloud, Disaster Recovery, MTTR

Last week I published my winning Customer X-Ray of the Quarter, which showed how AppDynamics was able to help a media customer solve a production issue that had plagued their application for over two years. This week I’m posting the runner-up X-Ray entry. This one describes how AppDynamics was able to help an Insurance customer avoid a production outage by spotting a major bottleneck as their application was migrated from dev to pre-production during performance testing. All of the X-Rays you see published in this blog were written by customers, so the stories you read are real, factual, and credible.

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apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, BTM, Business Transaction Management, Business Transactions, Insurance, Monitoring Production, MTTR, Prevent business impact, Root Cause Analysis, Slow Application, Slow Response Times

Six months ago I did something really stupid. I foolishly jumped on the social media bandwagon, thinking I could become the first super hero to claim online greatness. Sadly, the only meteoric rise has been the disk space quota for my email server inbox–all thanks to the billion notifications I now get daily from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. For all I know I could have been poked by He-Man, tweeted by Krusty the Clown or propositioned by Batman to join forces on LinkedIn. Sadly, the amount of crap I get these days from trigger-happy social media apps means I simply ignore and delete 99.9% of messages without ever reading them.

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When we founded AppDynamics, we wanted to disrupt the marketplace to make APM accessible to every organization. We felt Application Performance shouldn’t discriminate and should be available to all sizes of organizations, from startups to SMBs to large Enterprises. In the past, the Cost and Complexity of legacy APM made it only available to large Enterprises. Our belief is there should be no barriers for any organization that wants to deploy Application Performance Management. It should be simple to install, easy to use and cheap to own while obviously helping users master the performance and availability of their apps. At the same time, every organization is unique–so an APM solution has to be flexible to address the needs of all buyers.

Here are 5 things AppDynamics did differently to disrupt the APM market and become relevant to more and more organizations:

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Have you ever tried to troubleshoot a production bottleneck or outage? Let me guess: the first place you’ll look is log files, right? And in those log files lay all the answers to your problems? Err, not exactly. Log files are like haystacks; they take up lots of space and take hours to find the precious needles that are causing you pain. Even with tools like “kerplunk,” your troubleshooting success is only as good as the data you can collect, manage and report. You can’t log everything because disk I/O and debug logging is an expensive operation, which is why most log files today only contain basic information about what applications are doing in their various infrastructure silos.

For example, if you need to troubleshoot how a slow distributed business transaction executed across your infrastructure, it could take you hours or never to piece together a jigsaw. And if one piece of your jigsaw is missing, then the trail goes cold and you shrug your head. Bottom line, managing application performance with log files is still a long, manual and tedious task with no guarantee of success. You can’t manage with facts if you don’t have all the facts in the first place.

So even with tools that help you parse and index log files, you’re still dependent on the right data being captured and available. Pointing the finger with weak or incomplete evidence just fuels the fire when it comes to figuring out who and what is causing the issue. For example, have you ever tried telling a DBA his database is the issue just because it’s slow?

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apm, Application Performance Man, BTM, Business Transactions, Log Files, MTTR, Performance Management, Production Monitoring, Root Cause Analysis

Agile & DevOps, apm, Application Complexity, Application Performance Management, cloud, MTTR, SOA, Solving Performance