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

appdynamics, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Nastel, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Oracle, Quest Software, Sh#! APM Vendors Say

Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, JP Garbani, gives readers very pragmatic advice on the raison d’etre for APM.  Simply put, APM’s job is to:

1) Alert IT to application performance and availability issues before a full-scale outage occurs

2) Isolate or pinpoint the problem source

3) Provide deep-diagnostics to enable IT to determine the root cause

For several years now, JP Garbani has been on the forefront of proclaiming that modern APM solutions should enable IT organizations to manage apps not by gauging the heath of their servers or servlets, but instead by assessing what the customer or end-user cares about most – whether their Business Transaction completes quickly and doesn’t make them wait.  He states that this has become even more critical as applications have gotten more distributed and complex.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Forrester APM, Forrester APM Market Overview, Nastel, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Precise

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/case_studies/AppDynamics_CS_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.

Read the Full Post…

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

I made my first public appearance last week at JavaOne and had a blast mixing it with the dev community and the various exhibitors. Prior to being bitten by radioactive byte code, I’d attended JavaOne as a developer and had fond memories of vast crowds, packed session rooms, and nonstop partying. While JavaOne ran in parallel to Oracle Open World again this year, the event actually felt independent despite San Francisco city being littered with Oracle posters. Walking into the venue every morning felt like it was still the biggest Java conference in the world, especially when you had corridors of developers checking email on bean bags. Java is very much alive, despite skeptics claiming its dead or has no future. If you had to write a new mission critical application for your business today, I’d expect the majority of organizations would still opt for Java despite the hype around other languages like Ruby, Python and the return of PHP.

I was attending JavaOne with AppDynamics as an exhibitor, and I’m pleased to report things went very well for us. What was surprising is that many attendees already knew who we were and what we did, and that wasn’t just from U.S. attendees. I spoke to lots of developers from Europe who were already using AppDynamics Lite and were keen to see a demo of our latest Pro edition.

We also met several attendees who were in the process of evaluating APM toolsets for their organizations. which was great. APM is definitely becoming a priority now for many application teams, with most struggling to get decent performance and visibility in production. I had one alarming conversation with an architect while he was briefing me on his team’s success criteria for selecting an APM solution. I heard the words “All the monitoring vendors tell me they run in production with a few percent overhead so I’ll take their word for it.” For me that’s like agreeing to a mortgage without asking each bank what their actual interest rates and terms & conditions are. My advice to this chap was along the lines of “trust no vendor and prove all overhead claims in production.” The reality today is very few APM vendors can run and scale in production–even though they all sound the same!

Speaking of APM vendors, both OpNet and Quest invited me over to their booth and asked if I’d mind having my photo taken with them. Being an APM superhero I was more than happy to accept their offer; it’s actually good to banter with competitors who have a sense of humor. I did try my best with the other APM vendor, but all the booth staff declined while staring at the floor–something about getting into trouble with their boss if they were seen with App Man. Maybe they were afraid of my X-Ray vision…

Here’s a brief photo diary of what I got up to at JavaOne:

Video Summary:

AppDynamics Customer TiVo stopped by to say Hello:

Grabbing a Coffee at Starbucks:

Meeting Dubu Panda from BMC:

Saying hello OpNet:

Saying hello to Quest:

Enjoying a Beer after a long day:

apm, App Man, Application Performance, Java, JavaOne, JavaOne11, OpNet, Oracle Open World, Quest

How intelligent is your monitoring agent?

The agent should not do too much processing locally to ensure minimal impact to application performance by utilizing the smallest CPU and memory footprint possible. On the other hand, offloading some processing to the agent results in less network traffic and more scalability from the monitoring Mgmt Server.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, BTM, Business Transaction Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, HP BAC, IBM ITCAM, Monitoring Agents, OpNet, OpTier

On Tuesday, Gartner announced this year’s Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM).   I’ll make a few observations from reading the MQ and then suggest 3 additional criteria that APM buyers should consider to make informed buying decisions.

The research report started with an analysis of the APM market growth at 15% year-over-year and $2 billion in total market spend.  These facts reflect what we see every day – the market for APM is very strong and benefits from the high growth in web-driven commerce.  Web apps just can’t be slow.

One key APM growth driver is that modern applications have become more difficult to monitor – with more moving parts and a higher rate of change. Gartner summarizes this nicely in their market overview:

“Unfortunately, at just the moment when executives have become keen about imposing an application-centric view of the world on IT operations, applications have become far more difficult to monitor; in general, architectures have become more modular, redundant, distributed and dynamic, often laying down the particular twists and turns that a code execution path could take at the latest possible moment.”

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, Application Performance, Application Performance Monitoring, BTM, Business Transaction Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Gartner, Gartner APM Magic Quadrant, HP, IBM, OpNet, OpTier