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

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