Latest News from App Man

SaaS-Based APM: How to Troubleshoot Application Performance in Production

Sun, 06 May 2012 11:15:00 EDT

The most enjoyable part of my job at AppDynamics is to witness and evangelize customer success. What’s slightly strange is that for this to happen, an application has to slow down or crash. It’s a bittersweet feeling when End Users, Operations, Developers and many Businesses suffer application performance pain.

The Top 5 Reasons Customers are Migrating from CA Wily to AppDynamics

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:10:00 EDT

Let’s imagine you’re a CA customer and are monitoring several mission-critical applications with CEM (End User Monitoring) and Introscope (Java/.NET Monitoring) across approximately 1,000 servers in your enterprise. You’ve come to the end of your initial three-year Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) and are considering whether it’s worth renewing your annual support and maintenance contract with CA. Chances [...]

An Introduction to the Data Cloud

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 05:00:00 EDT

As data has grown exponentially at many sites, companies have been forced to horizontally scale their data. Some have turned to sharding of databases like Postrres or MySQL , while others have switched to newer NoSQL data systems. There have been many debates in the last few years about SQL vs. NoSQL data management systems.

Spot the Difference in AppDynamics 3.4

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:15:00 EDT

Okay, admit it. The title Spot the Difference in AppDynamics 3.4 caught your attention, especially after we just recently announced our free End User Monitoring features, and now you’re here to find out what other insanely cool stuff we’ve been working on to enhance the experience for APM aficionados, customers and people like you!

How Code Deadlock can Kill your Business

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:53:14 EDT

Imagine you’re an operations guy and you’ve just received a phone call or alert notifying you that the application your responsible for is running slow. You bring up your console, check all related processes, and notice one java.exe process isn’t using any CPU but the other Java processes are. The average sys admin at this [...]

APM vs NPM. 2nd Round K.O.

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:00:00 EDT

Round Two – Last time I wrote a blog comparing APM versus network-based APM tools, which I still consider NPM at it’s core regardless of what some critics and competitors claim. Let me make one thing clear though, NPM is great for equipping IT network administrators to see how fast or slow data is traveling [...]

End User Monitoring: How to Achieve Maximum Monitoring Visibility

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:30:00 EDT

Today, application logic is moving from the Server to the Browser to offer a more interactive and slick user experience, leveraging asynchronous event driven communication and a range of browser plugins (i.e. Adobe Flash & Microsoft Silverlight) as well as web toolkit frameworks (GWT, Dojo, JQuery). Application logic in the browser means more processing occurs on the client, and more processing means more latency–which can obviously impact the end user experience. It was therefore imperative for AppDynamics to be able to monitor this latency for modern web 2.0 and Cloud Applications. That’s why we came up with an innovative way to make it happen.

APM vs NPM: Round One

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 05:30:00 EST

Another three-letter acronym I see frequently mixed in with APM is NPM which stands for Network Performance Management. At first glance they look very similar. The distinction appears very subtle with just a one letter difference, but it speaks volumes because their core technologies and approaches to monitoring application performance are fundamentally different. Application Performance Management [...]

The New Generation of Enterprise Java: Designing for the Next Big Thing

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:20:34 EST

There’s been a generational shift in how Java enterprise applications are created: they have been broken down from a monolithic architecture into multiple services, and they’re highly interconnected and distributed. How can Java developers and Operations teams adapt to these changes? This keynote will discuss the 4 Big Things that Java professionals need to design [...]

Travel Company Karavel Boosts Application Performance by 20% with AppDynamics

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:57:53 EST

The X-Ray competition winner from last quarter came from an online travel company in France called Karavel who kindly documented their success with AppDynamics Pro. Karavel has been using AppDynamics extensively with custom dashboards, pro-actively alerting and also for optimizing slow business transactions in their production environment. Here is Karavel’s X-Ray case study as they [...]

How to Manage Rapidly Evolving, Distributed Environments

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

A new year, a new iPhone and a new quarter. What else is new? How about a new company? Last month I was fortunate enough to join a stellar marketing team at one of the fastest growing enterprise software startups in the bay area. The company you ask? AppDynamics.

Sh!t APM Vendors Say

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:25:33 EST

APM Market Disruptors – AppDynamics vs New Relic

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:49:27 EST

Last week a performance engineer called Ben Bramley published a blog entitled “APM Market Disruptors – AppDynamics and New Relic“. The purpose of his article was to provide an overview of AppDynamics and New Relic, whilst also summarizing the key approaches each vendor/solution has taken to simplify and disrupt the APM marketplace. Firstly, we’re thrilled [...]

Why Alerts Suck and Monitoring Solutions Need to Become Smarter

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:15:00 EST

I have yet to meet anyone in Dev or Ops who likes alerts. I’ve also yet to meet anyone who was fast enough to acknowledge an alert, so they could prevent an application from slowing down or crashing. In the real world alerts just don’t work, nobody has the time or patience anymore, alerts are truly evil and no-one trusts them. The most efficient alert today is an angry end user phone call, because Dev and Ops physically hear and feel the pain of someone suffering :) Why? There is little or no intelligence in how a monitoring solution determines what is normal or abnormal for application performance. Today, monitoring solutions are only as good as the users that configure them, which is bad news because humans make mistakes, configuration takes time, and time is something many of us have little of. It's therefore no surprise to learn that behavioral learning and analytics are becoming key requirements for modern application performance monitoring (APM) solutions. In fact, Will Capelli from Gartner recently published a report on IT Operational Analytics and pattern based strategies in the data center. The report covered the role of Complex Event Processing (CEP), behavior learning engines (BLEs) and analytics as a means for monitoring solutions to deliver better intelligence and quality information to Dev and Ops. Rather than just collect, store and report data, monitoring solutions must now learn and make sense of the data they collect, thus enabling them to become smarter and deliver better intelligence back to their users.

AppDynamics Growth – Not Bad for 3 Years

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:43:44 EST

AppDynamics has experienced significant growth over the past three years, here’s a quick summary of our key highlights. Embed this image on your site: Source: AppDynamics: Application Monitoring Company

AppDynamics Secures $20 Million in Series C Funding Led by Kleiner Perkins

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:55:31 EST

When I joined AppDynamics less than a year ago we were situated in a 6,000 sq ft “cosy” office on 2nd and Brannan. On my first day I was greeted with a MacBook Pro and was asked to find a spare desk amongst the boxes and carnage of a typical startup environment. To my left [...]

Gartner recognizes AppDynamics as APM Innovator

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:04:34 EST

It’s been a great start to 2012 for us at AppDynamics. Last week, we were recognized by Forrester Research in their APM market overview, and at the end of 2011, Gartner included us in their report “APM Innovators: Driving APM Technology and Delivery Evolution” which was co-written by Will Capelli and Jonah Kowall. According to Gartner’s report, [...]

AppDynamics recognized by Forrester in APM market overview

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:58:59 EST

Interest in the Application Performance Management (APM) category is very high right now. To stay one step ahead of their clients, the Industry Analysts who cover the category and write research to advise their clients have been very busy. In December alone, there were six different analyst reports being researched by the major analyst [...]

France’s #1 Travel Site Karavel Selects AppDynamics for APM over Compuware Dynatrace & CA Wily

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:05:02 EST

2011 was an amazing year for AppDynamics. We experienced tremendous growth and success, largely down to the many customers around the world who believed in our vision, technology, and ability to help Dev and Ops teams better manage application performance in production. The Application Performance Management (APM) market isn’t an easy market to succeed in, [...]

The 12 Days of DevOps

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:16:38 EST

Embed this image on your site: Source: AppDynamics: Application Monitoring Company

App Man has Beers with Santa Claus

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:34:46 EST

Hey Santa Claus, what’s happening man? Well, it’s that time of year again where unfortunately I have to work. Gift orders are up 50% and my elves are working their socks off right now stocking my warehouses for the big day. I honestly don’t know how I would have coped without my new ElfOps team–they’ve [...]

Storm Clouds in 2012? – Results of AppDynamics APM Survey

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:52:46 EST

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 [...]

Just how complex can a Login Transaction be? Answer: Very!

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:49:09 EST

People in our industry always talk about IT complexity and cost. Cost is pretty easy to calculate, because IT budgets are allocated and audited every year. Complexity is very different–we know it exists, but we can’t really see or measure it. Complexity is often when our brain tries to understand something and stalls in the process, [...]

Why Testing in Production Isn’t as Stupid as It Sounds

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:45:00 EST

One of my colleagues this week was consolidating the results from our recent Application Performance Management survey, and one interesting finding was that 40% of customers have at least one release cycle a month. Out of those respondents, one third experience a Severity-1 incident each month as well. That’s a pretty compelling pair of statistics, and they might explain the continued frustration and conflict between development and operations teams. It’s also perhaps the reason why this DevOps underground movement can no longer be ignored (even by Gartner). There is no doubt development organizations have become agile, but does deploying this frequent change make the business more or less agile? For example, if one in three releases creates a Severity-1 incident, then surely agile development becomes a risk to the business. We’re at the point where Operations either has to start managing change better or simply restrict the amount of change that can occur.

What is normal application performance?

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 10:46:29 EST

Peter Drucker proclaimed: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Do you know what’s “normal” for your mission-critical application? Actually, wait a second–with Halloween having just finished up, maybe the following Young Frankenstein reference is more appropriate. Whenever I focus on the word “normal,” the first thing that pops into my head (pardon [...]

Online media company gets proactive with application monitoring in production

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:40:37 EST

On Wednesday I delivered a keynote at WJAX in Munich. Everything went really well, but I was a little shocked at the response I got when I asked the audience “How many of you monitor the performance of your apps in production?” As I scanned the audience, I counted 9 out of ~950 developers had [...]

Just how useful is JMX Monitoring?

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:36:09 EDT

I’ve always been a skeptic of JMX monitoring, largely because I felt it was often wrongly positioned as the pillar stone of application monitoring software. An application for me is a collection of business services or transactions that users perform, that causes application logic (code) to request and process data. Without visibility into the performance [...]

Software that “Just Works”

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:28:59 EDT

This is my first blog. I’ve been a sales engineer for three application performance management (APM) products over the last 7 years (CA Wily Introscope, SpringSource/Hyperic, and now AppDynamics). I hadn’t really considered myself much of a “blogger” because I have alway thought that actions speak louder than words. So I guess you are wondering [...]

Not Everyone Is an Application Expert

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:15:00 EDT

The majority of us in IT are specialists, with the exception of a few VP of engineering who are “special” in their own “special” world of being “special”. What I mean by this is that no single person has the skills or experience to do everything well in IT. IT is too big for me to explain or summarize in a few words, other than it requires a lot of different people with different skills to make it tick along. Despite applications being the living breathing entities of the business, a large portion of folk in IT have little context of how applications are built, how they execute, and how they consume resource across the IT infrastructure. Many people simply don’t care as their responsibilities are completely void of anything application related. Thats fine, but the reality is that everyone in IT should have one eye on the business. The whole reason IT exists is so the business can be more competitive and make more money, if this happens IT gets more budget and is allowed to innovate more. IT and the business need each other to survive, which is why when applications slow down or break, both parties bitch at each other.

Application Monitoring with JConsole, VisualVM and AppDynamics Lite

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:54:00 EDT

What happens when mission critical Java applications slow down or keep crashing in production? The vast majority of IT Operations (Ops) today bury their heads in log files. Why? because thats what they’ve been doing since IBM invented the mainframe. Diving into the weeds feels good, everyone feels productive looking at log entries, hoping that one will eventually explain the unexplainable. IT Ops may also look at system and network metrics which tell them how server resource and network bandwidth is being consumed. Again, looking at lots of metrics feels good but what is causing those server and network metrics to change in the first place? Answer: the application. IT Ops monitor the infrastructure that applications run on, but they lack visibility of how applications actually work and utilize the infrastructure. To get this visibility, Ops must monitor the application run-time. A quick way to get started is to use the free tools that come with the application run-time. In the case of Java applications, both JConsole and VisualVM ship with the standard SDK and have proved popular choices for monitoring Java applications. When we built AppDynamics Lite we felt their was a void of free application monitoring solutions for IT Ops, the market had plenty of tools aimed at developers but many were just too verbose and intrusive for IT Ops to use in production. If we take a look at how JConsole, VisualVM and AppDynamics Lite compare, we’ll see just how different free application monitoring solutions can be.

App Man Montage from JavaOne and Visual Studio Live

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:38:03 EDT

Free your Application Performance Management with AppDynamics Lite 2.0

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:05:24 EDT

In May last year we launched AppDynamics Lite 1.0, the first free application performance management (APM) solution to monitor and troubleshoot a production JVM. 18 Months and 50,000+ users later I’m pleased to announce version 2 of AppDynamics Lite is here and the innovation hasn’t stopped. In fact, I would say Lite 2.0 gives many [...]

App Man unveils himself at JavaOne

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:00:11 EDT

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 [...]

Agent Intelligence

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:28:37 EDT

How intelligent is your monitoring agent? The agent should not do too much processing locally to ensure minimal impact to application performance by utilizing the smallest CPU and memory footprint possible. On the other hand, offloading some processing to the agent results in less network traffic and more scalability from the monitoring Mgmt Server. Johnny [...]

Application Performance Management On-Demand

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:22:00 EDT

I thought it would be good to start blogging about my experiences with customers just so you get an idea of how important Application Performance Management (APM) has become. A few weeks back I met with a customer who had issues, the expression on their face said it all. It started with an apology that several people couldn’t make our meeting, why? because they were investigating a production outage. You might think I’ve just made that up, I can assure you this was real and a frequent event which I’ve witnessed many a time. It can be especially annoying when you’ve travelled many miles to chat with a customer expecting to have a productive meeting and then the alarm bells ring. However, an outage in this scenario just validates the reason why you’re there in the first place.

Gartners Application Mapping and Transaction Profiling Explained

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 05:12:32 EDT

Gartner recently released their latest magic quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and in this report mentioned five key dimensions, two of which were Application Mapping and Transaction Profiling. These two dimensions are critical for users to identify performance bottlenecks in distributed applications, whose architecture design is typically based around SOA or Cloud concepts. The [...]

Gartner publishes 2011 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 04:37:14 EDT

On Tuesday, Gartner announced this year’s Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM). I’ll make a few observations from reading the MQ and then suggest 3 additional criteria that APM buyers should consider to make informed buying decisions. The research report started with an analysis of the APM market growth at 15% year-over-year and $2 [...]

Cloud Migration won’t happen overnight

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:58:31 EDT

There is a massive difference between migrating some code to the cloud and migrating an entire application to the cloud. Yes, the heart of any application is indeed its codebase, but code can’t execute without data and there lies the biggest challenge of any cloud migration. “No problem,” you say. “We can just move our [...]

The Laws of AppDynamics

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:26:24 EDT

Comparing AppDynamics vs DynaTrace, CA Wily, Precise and HP

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 03:39:39 EDT

One of our partners recently outlined a logical framework for evaluating Application Performance Management (APM) vendors to help prospects and customers choose the right APM solution for their needs. Below is an extract along with a link to the full article: “We work with a lot of customers helping them with performance and scalability of [...]

AppDynamics Monitoring for MongoDB

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:36:37 EDT

Back in April this year, we announced new monitoring support for NoSQL tecnhnologies like Cassandra and Memcached which was received really well by our customers. Due to further demand we’ve seen over the past few months from prospects and customers we’ve officially added MongoDB to our platform support, thus extending our coverage of NoSQL technologies. For those not [...]

Applications Will Fail (Even in the Cloud)

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:15:00 EDT

I’m fed up of reading about Cloud outages, largely because all applications are created and managed by the most dangerous species on the planet – the human being. Failure is inevitable in regards to everything the human being creates or touches, and for this reason alone I see no news in seeing the word “outage” [...]

The Real Cost of Application Performance Management (APM) Ownership

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:45:00 EDT

APM doesn’t need to cost what it cost 10 years ago. Today, the costs of APM ownership can vary significantly depending on what solution you deploy. As the saying goes, “Buyer Beware.” In addition, there are four ownership costs to be evaluated before making a purchase, three of which may not be obvious and may lead to unpleasant surprises. APM Software Licenses Hardware/System Software Required to Operate APM Software APM Deployment & Instrumentation Costs APM Ongoing Maintenance Costs

AppDynamics takes Cassandra out for Beer and Big Data

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 05:47:23 EDT

Welcome Cassandra, let’s start with a quick introduction of who you are and what you can do. I am a high-performance distributed scalable database. I am really good at doing lots of operations and growing as your data needs increase, and to top that all off I run on commodity hardware which means I’m really [...]

Top Tips for Managing .NET Application Performance

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:15:00 EDT

There are many technical articles/blogs on the web that jump straight into areas of .NET code you can instantly optimize and tune. Before we get to some of those areas, it’s good to take a step back and ask yourself, “Why am I here?” Are you interested in tuning your app, which is slow and keeps breaking, or are you looking to prevent these things from happening in the future? When you start down the path of Application Performance Management (APM), it is worth asking yourself another important question – what is success? This is especially important if you’re looking to tune or optimize your application. Knowing when to stop is as important as knowing when to start.

The DevOps War Room

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:34:36 EDT

What Does APM and Tiger Woods Have in Common?

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:30:00 EDT

At the USA PGA golf tourney last week, Tiger Woods missed the cut for only the 3rd time in his career. Whilst “Go Tiger” has indeed taken on a completely new meaning over the past few years, he is still the worlds #1 sports earner. CNN recently published the 50 highest-earning American athletes in which Tiger was ranked #1 ($90 million). We’ve got no axe to grind with Tiger, but if you study his earnings closely, the reality is that he is living off his past glory. Over 70% of his earnings for the past three years have come from endorsements and sponsorship. Yet, if you look at ESPN’s worldwide golf rankings this year, you’ll see that Tiger ranks #33 for his actual play. The current top three in the world (Luke Donlad, Lee Westwood & Steve Stricker) may not have won a major but they’ve been more consistent with Top 10 finishes. So, what makes today’s #1 golfer then? Is it the one with the most tournament wins and Top 10 finishing positions this year? Or, is it the one with the most total earnings, including earnings from sponsorships and paid endorsements? As you’d probably guess, we think it’s the former.

“The Adjustment Hero” starring App Man

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:09:42 EDT

Need help managing your Application Performance? Get started with AppDynamics Lite (Free Download) or AppDynamics Pro (Free 30 Day Trial)

Planning for Failure with Application Performance Management (APM)

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:00:00 EDT

If you are running mission-critical applications and do not have a strategy to deal with failure, you are putting your whole organization at risk. You may think that your application cannot fail, but at some point everything fails. It may not be the software running your application that fails – it could be the hardware, the network, or even a natural disaster in your area that causes your application to go down. In case of such failure, no matter how rare, your customers will still expect the same level of service, not to mention preservation of their data. Without a failover strategy and a tested backup infrastructure you will be out of service for an unknown period of time, which will lead to angry customers and loss of revenue.

.NET Application Performance delivered with AppDynamics 3.3

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:32:58 EDT

It’s official: AppDynamics support for Microsoft .NET and Windows Azure is finally here! We’ve got the same Kick Ass Product with the same Secret Sauce–but now it sports a shiny new CLR agent. So whether your apps are Java, .NET or hybrid, with AppDynamics you have the best of both worlds when it comes to [...]