In today’s digitally transformed world, the ability to observe applications and correlate them to infrastructure, security tools and networks across an enterprise’s entire ecosystem is essential. Technologists are innovating and evolving their IT stacks faster than ever before to keep pace with user demands, adopting leading-edge, agile cloud platforms like Azure Spring Cloud that allow them to easily deploy and run Spring Boot applications at scale. The subsequent rise in complexity has left them struggling to identify and mitigate issues before they affect their customers — and eventually the bottom line.
Full-stack observability is the key to gaining a leg up on potential problems before customer challenges impact the business. Critical for growth, it allows companies to transform siloed data into actionable insights that provide shared context to IT teams. As a result, they can work more collaboratively to optimize costs and performance, deliver exceptional experiences, and maximize digital business revenue.
Delivering full-stack observability through partnership
AppDynamics and Microsoft continue to partner to ensure Azure customers can maintain the superior level of full-stack observability they need for their cloud native applications on Azure. Today we’re pleased to share that our customers can now observe what matters most across their services and workloads deployed on Azure Spring Cloud — with no code changes required.
By using AppDynamics, enterprises can monitor and migrate modern applications to the cloud and enable seamless collaboration among IT development, operations and business teams. Unified monitoring and real-time insights bring everyone together to maximize application performance, the user experience and business outcomes.
I asked Gregg Ostrowski, Executive CTO at AppDynamics, for his thoughts on this new integration. “I’m excited by our continued partnership with Microsoft. AppDynamics will provide developers working within Azure Spring Cloud with real-time visibility and correlated insights that enable them to isolate the root cause of any performance issues and optimize microservices with context to the business impact.”
Julia Liuson, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Developer Division, shares his enthusiasm. “Microsoft is committed to making it easier for Azure Spring Cloud developers to run their apps at scale on Azure. AppDynamics is a critical part of full-stack observability for many of our customers, and through our partnership they can now get this functionality integrated into Azure Spring Cloud. Supporting APM tools of choice for developers — like AppDynamics — minimizes change so they can focus on delivering new capabilities.”
Activating the AppDynamics agent in Azure Spring Cloud
Activating the AppDynamics agent in an Azure Spring Cloud deployment is as simple as configuring the JVM option and environment variables when deploying a service via the Azure CLI (see the image below).
You can also activate it through the Azure portal or by utilizing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.
What’s in store once you activate
Once you activate the AppDynamics agent, you gain full visibility into the services that make up your Azure Spring Cloud applications.
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You can see automated flow maps that show the flow of data through applications, revealing microservice dependencies and exact locations of issues to be addressed so that you can mitigate business impact.
You’re also able to dive deep into diagnostic details, such as insights into .NET and .NET Core method calls, application components running Azure App Service, and serverless functions and granular method-level code details and database queries. And for occasional troubleshooting, you can turn on development mode, in which certain default limits on the data that AppDynamics collects are turned off for even greater visibility into application activities.
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And possibly best of all for busy IT professionals like yourself, AppDynamics traces key business transactions based on production application behavior and dynamically baselines performance, automatically discovering what’s “normal” so that you only get alerts when thresholds are exceeded.
See the AppDynamics agent in action
In the following video, Asir Vedamuthu Selvasingh, Microsoft PM Architect, Java on Azure, shows how to easily and effectively monitor your Spring Boot applications running in Azure Spring Cloud and spot every application issue on the spot with AppDynamics.
>>> Learn more about AppDynamics for Microsoft Azure and check out our playbook to see how you can turn performance into profit with a deeper understanding of application and user behavior. And turn on full-stack observability for your Azure Spring Cloud applications today!