In February at Cisco Live 2023 Amsterdam, Cisco AppDynamics announced contextual trace visualization and Red Hat® OpenShift® Kubernetes® for AppDynamics Cloud, which we discussed in the AppDynamics Cloud introduces contextual troubleshooting and cloud mobility capabilities blog.
Seamless Grafana dashboard visibility
The complexity of cloud native applications, depending on call-by-call interactions between multi-service architectures, makes monitoring and troubleshooting performance problems challenging. With more places and ways failures can occur, root cause analysis has become difficult without the ability to consolidate MELT data from multiple sources. Dashboards have become the critical first line of visibility into monitoring the health and availability of applications but integrating dozens of monitoring and observability tools to create a consolidated view can be challenging for technology teams.
For many of our customers, Grafana has emerged as the de-facto tool for building customizable dashboards for various technology teams, including DevOps, SRE, Cloud Ops and more. Therefore, I’m excited to introduce the new AppDynamics-developed open-source Grafana plugin for AppDynamics Cloud. Today, there are over 900,000 open-source Grafana dashboard instances, so the AppDynamics Cloud plugin will enable our customers to easily integrate AppDynamics Cloud into their established dashboard environment and practices to extend its visibility across various technology teams. We’ve also made it easy for organizations not currently using Grafana by including sample dashboards and quick-start reference widgets to minimize the learning required to get started.
While Grafana dashboards are a valuable tool for organizations, it’s important to note they are not a one size fits all observability solution. Technology teams have different responsibilities, so we engineered the plugin with multi-tenant support to ensure AppDynamics Cloud data can extend across multiple dashboards customized to the roles of various teams. They are also only the first line of visibility, so we’ve made it easy for users to seamlessly click over to AppDynamics Cloud from their Grafana dashboard when an issue is spotted. AppDynamics Clouds’ continuous-context experience makes it simple for users to quickly drill down on issues to identify the root cause and prioritize remediation based on business impact.
The AppDynamics Cloud plugin for Grafana is available for download now. For more information on getting started, check out the Integrate AppDynamics Cloud with Grafana page, and be sure to register for the April 6 webinar, Introducing the Grafana Plugin for AppDynamics Cloud.
Rapidly investigate unknowns with log analytics
For site reliability engineers (SRE), log files are a valuable tool to piece together why an application is not performing as needed. However, finding the correct logs to investigate unknown issues can be a painful process of manually sorting through large volumes of log files or playing a guessing game searching for errors.
While searches can save some time finding errors, root cause analysis still requires manual inspection of the logs before and after that error and correlating them to application services and business transactions. And if that error is not the cause of the issue they are trying to identify, they start the search over.
To reduce customers’ time investigating unknown performance issues, we’ve introduced log analytics for AppDynamics Cloud. Our log analytics capability utilizes machine learning to detect log patterns and group log messages based on their similarities and, importantly, recognize suspicious ones. In addition to grouping log messages, AppDynamics Cloud can now intelligently rank those groups based on changes to log patterns, the severity of those changes and anomalies identified within the logs. SREs can quickly view log message groups, see an overview of detected patterns, filter logs by detection patterns and dive deeper into them.
Serverless monitoring with support for AWS Lambda
Today, many organizations are building their applications with code that triggers events to enrich the application experience for end users and improve operational efficiency. Responding to triggered events requires real-time scaling of computing capability and capacity. Rather than provisioning and managing servers (or EC2 instances) with resources that sit idle waiting for an event, organizations are turning to serverless computing, like AWS Lambda. While the highly efficient, on-demand computing of AWS Lambda enables developers to build applications that can trigger events in real-time, the complexity of microservices-based architectures makes it critical for technology teams to have full visibility of their environment.
Amazon CloudWatch is a great starting point for monitoring applications utilizing Lambda (and other AWS services). Still, technology teams and business leaders must consider that applications can depend on multiple services outside of AWS. Why is this important? Because CloudWatch only extends to AWS services (in AWS or on-prem) so, gaining full visibility of application flows and troubleshooting performance issues can become challenging without the ability to map dependencies to map traces end-to-end fully.
Realizing the full benefits of applications utilizing Lambda requires technology teams to have observability across their entire cloud environment. AppDynamics Cloud now supports AWS Lambda to provide technology teams observability across the application ecosystem with correlated insights and root cause analysis detailing the impact on user experience. DevOps and SRE teams can optimize AWS Lambda functions, allowing them to innovate faster with greater confidence and less risk.
Keeping up with AppDynamics Cloud innovations
For a complete list of AppDynamics innovations and more information about the new features and capabilities mentioned here, check out the AppDynamics Product Updates, and stay tuned as we come back for more of What’s New with AppDynamics Cloud soon.
Check out more AppDynamics Cloud blogs:
- AppDynamics Cloud introduces contextual troubleshooting and cloud mobility capabilities
- AppDynamics turns cloud native chaos into business context
Sunny Dua is a product management leader with 20 years of experience in digital transformation, application modernization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, business observability and AIOps. While leading large product portfolios at VMware and now at Cisco AppDynamics, Sunny has established a passion for defining vision and strategy and executing complex product roadmaps to build successful and innovative products.
Sunny is a graduate of the Stanford School of Business with interests in the field of critical & analytical thinking, strategic leadership and design thinking.
