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

Last week a performance engineer called Ben Bramley published a blog entitled “APM Market Disruptors – AppDynamics and New Relic“. The purpose of his article was to provide an overview of AppDynamics and New Relic, whilst also summarizing the key approaches each vendor/solution has taken to simplify and disrupt the APM marketplace.

Firstly, we’re thrilled to be recognized by a blogger, who in this case, had previous hands on experience with Application Performance Management (APM) products like OpTier, CA Wily, HP and dynaTrace. Secondly, whilst it was obviously good (and slightly nerving at times) to read our features and capabilities compared with another vendor (and the APM market in general), it was actually nice to see our freemium and SaaS based go-to-market strategy being recognized as well. I guess these things were actually the main reason why a blogger could access, compare and contrast two next generation APM solutions in the first place. It’s not like IBM, CA or Compuware would make their APM solution available to the masses for evaluation, let alone welcome an independent opinion.

You can read Ben’s blog article in full here.

App Man.

Update: HP does in fact offer their solution (HP Diagnostics v9) via trial, but you’ve got to download and install 4GB of their software.  In the time it takes to do this you could already be up and running with AppDynamics Lite.

APM Market Disruptors, AppDynamics vs New Relic, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Dynatrace, HP, IBM, New Relic, OpTier, Web Monitoring

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