I was recently reading Freakonomics’ authors Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner’s latest book, Think Like a Freak, and passed over a quote that really resonated with me:
So rather than address their root causes, we often spend billions of dollars treating the symptoms and are left to grimace when the problem remains.
Sure they were referring to socioeconomic issues such as poverty and crime and not application monitoring, however, the statement still holds true. Since my time at AppDynamics I’ve seen and overheard customers claiming they don’t need an APM solution because they have been adding more servers and hiring more personnel to help monitor their application and ensure it’s up and running. But aren’t these simply addressing the symptoms?
Being reactive to application issues and constantly firefighting is simply not an efficient nor scalable way to handle performance. Instead of enabling efficiency and finding the root cause of your application issues, they’re spending money attempting to resolve the symptoms of inadequate monitoring. What’s needed is an all-encompassing platform which gives you application intelligence — real-time code-level visibility so you can isolate root cause and treat the underlying performance problems instead of constantly running around treating the symptoms.
With AppDynamics you get end-to-end visibility and are able to drill down to find the exact line of troubling code which is the root cause of the performance issue. That’s a powerful tool.
No more needing to take Advil and DayQuil and NyQuil and Sudafed to get rid of your [application] cold symptoms. AppDynamics allows you to find the damaging sickness and simply fix it. This issue is exacerbated in cloud and distributed complex environments since finding the root cause becomes that much more difficult. Therefore the costs and time stemming from a single issue increase exponentially. If you’re spending valuable resources treating the symptoms, then you’re losing innovation and slowing growth.
One AppDynamics customer, Priceline.com, has lowered their MTTR by finding root cause and zeroing in on the code. Check out their story and how they use AppDynamics here. FamilySearch estimated they saved over $1.3 million by lowering their MTTR in production and pre-production issues by quickly and efficiently resolving the root cause.
You can also check out more about Application Intelligence and AppDynamics in this short video:
Thinking like a Freak means you should work terribly hard to identify and attack the root cause of problems.
Want to stop treating your application performance symptoms and starting fixing the root cause? Check out AppDynamics and start a free trial today.
