AppDynamics Cloud introduces contextual troubleshooting and cloud mobility capabilities

February 06 2023
 

At Cisco Live 2023 Amsterdam, AppDynamics Cloud unveils support for hybrid clouds and now empowers teams to contextually explore traces to pinpoint service issues faster.


Today, whether an organization is in consumer services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, B2B or B2C, market leadership is defined by the digital experience a business can deliver to its customers. Consumer expectations for digital services continue to rise, and to meet these demands with ongoing agility, scalability and reliability, businesses are accelerating cloud native application development using distributed architectures while refactoring existing applications for cloud native environments. It’s with this in mind that we launched AppDynamics Cloud at Cisco Live in June 2022 and continue to deliver a solution that not only simplifies the complexity of distributed, cloud native environments but also aligns with our customer’s digital business objectives.

What’s new this month in AppDynamics Cloud

Technology and business success are more intertwined than ever, and digital leadership is now at the center of strategies focused on driving organizational growth and market leadership. Aligning with our customers’ business objectives means modern observability needs to go beyond simply monitoring telemetry data and address our customers’ most essential questions, the behavior of their systems and its impact on their business. We’re quickly enhancing AppDynamics Cloud to enable our customers to ask those key observability questions and get the right answers. In November, we announced the addition of business transaction insights, which, combined with AppDynamics Cloud’s continuous-context experience, transforms cloud native complexity into humanly understandable observability dimensions, allowing technology teams to focus on optimizing what matters to an end user’s digital transaction experience.

And we’re not stopping there. At Cisco Live, we are excited to announce new innovations in AppDynamics Cloud for contextual trace visualization and Red Hat® OpenShift® Kubernetes®.

Introducing Trace Visualization for AppDynamics Cloud

Based on feedback from existing AppDynamics and AppDynamics Cloud customers, the ability to troubleshoot applications in context with business metrics is an important capability that enables DevOps teams to interact with developers and business stakeholders. The introduction of contextual trace visualization to AppDynamics Cloud closes the troubleshooting loop. Working in conjunction with the business transaction insights and existing log capabilities, our customers gain efficiency in their ability to identify, prioritize and troubleshoot the most critical application issues that can impact customer experiences and business outcomes.

Modern, cloud native applications depend on call-by-call interactions between complex multi-service architectures, making troubleshooting performance problems extremely challenging for DevOps teams. With millions of places and ways failures can occur, root cause analysis has become difficult without the ability to drill deep into telemetry data and index anomalies to understand software behavior. To ensure DevOps teams can monitor application health and performance, software developers are increasingly instrumenting applications according to the OpenTelemetry™ distributed tracing specification, making them observable and delivering meaningful business metrics collected at the user-interaction level.

Contextual trace visualization for AppDynamics Cloud seamlessly integrates OpenTelemetry distributed tracing within AppDynamics Cloud’s continuous-context experience, enabling DevOps teams to quickly identify the business impact of issues within critical flows. It also allows teams to perform granular root-cause analysis using trace visualization in conjunction with logs to know what’s happening, where the issue is occurring, and why.  All without filtering through huge data volumes to get to the root cause of a problem. This combined insight enables DevOps teams to work bi-directionally between software developers and business stakeholders to prioritize mean time to resolution (MTTR) for critical business flows.

Our new contextual trace visualization capability enables DevOps to not just visualize their traces but also search and filter across spans and other MELT data. The underlying full-stack observability platform that powers AppDynamics Cloud performs sophisticated processing of telemetry data and generates a model, which allows the user to look at the data from new perspectives.

Imagine that the user is not only able to ask:

“Give me the trace that had a 403 error,” but is also able to ask:

“Show me a trace that went through both service X and service Y and had an error,” or:

“Show me all the traces that went through the services that had high CPU usage and had both code error and 403 errors somewhere along the way.”

The amazing thing about AppDynamics Cloud is that these types of questions are not just limited to tracing. They can also include underlying Kubernetes and other cloud constructs that power cloud native applications. With the contextual trace visualization capability, teams can seamlessly navigate between Kubernetes constructs (such as clusters, namespaces, workloads, services, etc.) and traces and spans all the way to business transactions. For each of these constructs, the underlying observability platform synthesizes all aspects of telemetry (i.e., the MELT data types) to provide holistic information.

Business Transactions provide business context to troubleshooting teams. Understanding the business impact of outages is crucial in enabling teams to prioritize troubleshooting based on how issues affect end user experiences and digital business KPIs.

Hybrid cloud observability with support for Red Hat OpenShift

Top-line business outcomes are often the priority in times of accelerated growth and change, but as businesses adapt to new operating models, the pressure intensifies to extract greater economic efficiencies to optimize costs. Red Hat OpenShift support provides teams the flexibility to power their modern applications across public clouds with AWS and Azure, on-premises and in hybrid clouds while delivering the best application performance, experiences and economics.

As digital services are developed and deployed with modern architectures, teams increasingly rely on an ecosystem of Kubernetes services across cloud models that deliver the best economics for the business.  AppDynamics Cloud introduces observability for modern applications running on the Red Hat OpenShift enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform, enabling flexibility across multiple operating environments while delivering the best application performance, experiences, and economics.

With support for Red Hat OpenShift, AppDynamics Cloud gives teams the ability to correlate the performance of their Kubernetes platforms to application performance and end user and business impacts across a hybrid cloud environment. With this new level of hybrid cloud observability, teams can deliver consistent performance and seamless end user experiences anywhere they can achieve the best OpEx economics for their business.

The right tool for the right job with AppDynamics Cloud

The complexity of modern applications has made it unfeasible for DevOps teams to rely on traditional monitoring to ensure applications can deliver the desired business outcomes. While many vendors have addressed the need for cloud native observability by bolting cleverly named features onto legacy monitoring platforms, we took a different path. Starting with a blank slate, we built AppDynamics Cloud as a completely new, purpose-built observability platform designed to deliver the critical capabilities needed to address the challenges facing our customers today and tomorrow. Was this the easy path to take? Nope!  Our approach may be quite different, but it has given us the freedom to design an extensible solution built on an open standards foundation for collecting and correlating data into usable insights that surpass both our competitors’ and OpenTelemetry’s basic capabilities. I’m extremely proud of the work being done by the AppDynamics team as we continue to execute our vision to enhance AppDynamics Cloud to address our customers’ immediate and long-term requirements.

Learn more about AppDynamics Cloud and stay tuned as we come back for more of What’s new with AppDynamics Cloud soon.

 

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form