Q&A: AppDynamics Talks About APM - Part 3

Pete Goldin
APMdigest
Learn more about Cisco

In Part 3 of APMdigest's exclusive interview, AppDynamics talks about Unified Monitoring, analytics and the AppDynamics Summer 15 release. Bhaskar Sunkara is AppDynamics CTO and SVP of Product Management. Jonah Kowall is VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics. Kalyan Ramanathan is VP of Product Marketing at AppDynamics.

Start with Part 1 of the Interview

Start with Part 2 of the Interview

APM: What does AppDynamics mean by "Unified Monitoring"?

Ramanathan: Unified Monitoring is the industry-first, application-centric solution that traces and monitors transactions from the end user, through the entire application and infrastructure environment, to help quickly and proactively solve performance issues, and ensure excellent user experience. The unified solution leverages a common data platform, making it easy to install and manage, and provides consistent and shareable interfaces for all users. This approach replaces the miscellany of siloed, non-integrated, infrastructure-specific tools that characterize the monitoring solution for many enterprises.

APM: What makes AppDynamics Unified Monitoring different?

Kowall: AppDynamics’ vision of Unified Monitoring starts with the user and transaction as they flow through  application components and relate this user and their transactions to the other parts of the infrastructure. Our Unified Monitoring is not about availability or event management. Rather, it is about how the infrastructure relates back to the user and the transaction— both of which are key to today’s businesses as they become software-defined. This visibility and technology is made possible by watching every line of code.

Sunkara: In the past, “unified monitoring” has been multiple products supplying you with multiple views— more of a top down approach and leading with a business transaction. The difference between the old attempts at unified monitoring and AppDynamics’ approach is that we are bringing all of the data throughout the various layers and placing them in a single data store. This allows for a much more powerful correlation, done organically.

APM: How does integrated analytics add an advantage?

Sunkara: Integrated analytics—especially with what AppDynamics’ is doing with analytics— really paint a picture of how performance is linking back to business. For example, APM tells you where the problem is and how to fix, whereas analytics tell you the impact of that problem— who was impacted, whether the business and/or customers were affected, etc. You need a lot more context to deal with the business impact and without an integrated approach to put both the APM and analytics pieces together, the performance dimension will be extremely difficult.

APM: What is AppDynamics war room feature? How does it alleviate the problems associated with the traditional war room?

Ramanathan: One of the biggest challenges IT organizations face in trying to solve urgent application issues is getting the entire organization on the same page, to see the same data, and reach conclusions together. Typically, a mix of communication tools are involved — phone calls, chat, emails, in-person discussions, etc.—  which often leaves the team collectively out of sync. The AppDynamics Virtual War Room solves those issues by creating a virtual space where everyone — development, operations, and business users —  can see the same data, chat, make changes to application configuration and settings in real time, and collaborate on every level, in the same space. Such collaboration radically shortens time-to-resolution for application issues and reduces their business impact. The results of this process then can be captured and indexed in knowledge management systems to streamline future troubleshooting.

APM: What other new features does the Summer 15 release offer?

Ramanathan: The Summer 15 release includes:

■ Unified Monitoring: the industry-first, application-centric integrated monitoring solution.

■ Public beta availability of Browser Synthetic Monitoring: AppDynamics’ distributed, cloud-based, intelligent monitoring solution for programmatically testing website availability, functionality, and performance.

■ Server Monitoring: AppDynamics’ new server monitoring platform is available as a public beta. Fully integrated into the Application Intelligence Platform interface, it extends the AppDynamics Server Monitoring capability to provide enhanced host visibility, extended CPU, network and storage performance metrics, comprehensive dashboard, and detailed process list information.

■ Python Application Performance Monitoring: AppDynamics’ Python APM provides code-level application monitoring, business transaction monitoring, errors and exception detection in real time, and as part of AppDynamics Unified Monitoring, visibility into processes, components, and dependencies that impact Python performance.

ABOUT Bhaskar Sunkara

As CTO and SVP of Product Management, Bhaskar Sunkara is responsible for product management, user experience, and field engineering enablement at AppDynamics. He also drives AppDynamics' Customer-centric Innovation methodology to combine customer feedback with fast-paced innovation. Sunkara was an original founder of AppDynamics and served as Director of Engineering responsible for all product development. Prior to joining AppDynamics, Sunkara was Lead Engineer at Wily Technology, where he pioneered a dynamic instrumentation engine as well as the company's product expansion into .NET. Prior to that, he was Lead Engineer for Pramati Technologies, where he was one of the key people behind the design and development of their J2EE Application Server. Sunkara received a BS degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Madras University.

ABOUT Jonah Kowall

As VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics, Jonah Kowall helps drive the AppDynamics product roadmap and vision, while developing entry into new markets and providing valuable technology and business insights to fuel the accelerating and broad-based demand for the company’s Application Intelligence Platform. Kowall has a diverse background including 15 years as an IT practitioner at several startups and larger enterprises focused on infrastructure and operations, security, and performance engineering. These included running tactical and strategic operational initiatives, going deep into monitoring of infrastructure and application components. In 2011, Kowall changed careers, moving to Gartner to focus on availability and performance monitoring and IT operations management (ITOM). He led Gartner's influential Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) Magic Quadrants and research as a Research VP.

ABOUT Kalyan Ramanathan

Kalyan Ramanathan is VP of Product Marketing at AppDynamics. He as more than 20 years of experience in software and marketing, with a deep understanding of the mobile ecosystem and the broader IT operations market. Prior to AppDynamics, he served as CMO at Crittercism, a provider of mobile application performance management (mAPM) solutions. Prior to Crittercism, Ramanathan served as VP of Marketing at Electric Cloud, a DevOps automation leader, and as Senior Director of Product Marketing at Opsware/HP, where he oversaw marketing for HP’s data center automation and application performance management suite. Prior to Opsware, Ramanathan led product marketing and product management at Collation (acquired by IBM) and Portal Software (acquired by Oracle). Ramanathan began his career at Intel and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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Q&A: AppDynamics Talks About APM - Part 3

Pete Goldin
APMdigest
Learn more about Cisco

In Part 3 of APMdigest's exclusive interview, AppDynamics talks about Unified Monitoring, analytics and the AppDynamics Summer 15 release. Bhaskar Sunkara is AppDynamics CTO and SVP of Product Management. Jonah Kowall is VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics. Kalyan Ramanathan is VP of Product Marketing at AppDynamics.

Start with Part 1 of the Interview

Start with Part 2 of the Interview

APM: What does AppDynamics mean by "Unified Monitoring"?

Ramanathan: Unified Monitoring is the industry-first, application-centric solution that traces and monitors transactions from the end user, through the entire application and infrastructure environment, to help quickly and proactively solve performance issues, and ensure excellent user experience. The unified solution leverages a common data platform, making it easy to install and manage, and provides consistent and shareable interfaces for all users. This approach replaces the miscellany of siloed, non-integrated, infrastructure-specific tools that characterize the monitoring solution for many enterprises.

APM: What makes AppDynamics Unified Monitoring different?

Kowall: AppDynamics’ vision of Unified Monitoring starts with the user and transaction as they flow through  application components and relate this user and their transactions to the other parts of the infrastructure. Our Unified Monitoring is not about availability or event management. Rather, it is about how the infrastructure relates back to the user and the transaction— both of which are key to today’s businesses as they become software-defined. This visibility and technology is made possible by watching every line of code.

Sunkara: In the past, “unified monitoring” has been multiple products supplying you with multiple views— more of a top down approach and leading with a business transaction. The difference between the old attempts at unified monitoring and AppDynamics’ approach is that we are bringing all of the data throughout the various layers and placing them in a single data store. This allows for a much more powerful correlation, done organically.

APM: How does integrated analytics add an advantage?

Sunkara: Integrated analytics—especially with what AppDynamics’ is doing with analytics— really paint a picture of how performance is linking back to business. For example, APM tells you where the problem is and how to fix, whereas analytics tell you the impact of that problem— who was impacted, whether the business and/or customers were affected, etc. You need a lot more context to deal with the business impact and without an integrated approach to put both the APM and analytics pieces together, the performance dimension will be extremely difficult.

APM: What is AppDynamics war room feature? How does it alleviate the problems associated with the traditional war room?

Ramanathan: One of the biggest challenges IT organizations face in trying to solve urgent application issues is getting the entire organization on the same page, to see the same data, and reach conclusions together. Typically, a mix of communication tools are involved — phone calls, chat, emails, in-person discussions, etc.—  which often leaves the team collectively out of sync. The AppDynamics Virtual War Room solves those issues by creating a virtual space where everyone — development, operations, and business users —  can see the same data, chat, make changes to application configuration and settings in real time, and collaborate on every level, in the same space. Such collaboration radically shortens time-to-resolution for application issues and reduces their business impact. The results of this process then can be captured and indexed in knowledge management systems to streamline future troubleshooting.

APM: What other new features does the Summer 15 release offer?

Ramanathan: The Summer 15 release includes:

■ Unified Monitoring: the industry-first, application-centric integrated monitoring solution.

■ Public beta availability of Browser Synthetic Monitoring: AppDynamics’ distributed, cloud-based, intelligent monitoring solution for programmatically testing website availability, functionality, and performance.

■ Server Monitoring: AppDynamics’ new server monitoring platform is available as a public beta. Fully integrated into the Application Intelligence Platform interface, it extends the AppDynamics Server Monitoring capability to provide enhanced host visibility, extended CPU, network and storage performance metrics, comprehensive dashboard, and detailed process list information.

■ Python Application Performance Monitoring: AppDynamics’ Python APM provides code-level application monitoring, business transaction monitoring, errors and exception detection in real time, and as part of AppDynamics Unified Monitoring, visibility into processes, components, and dependencies that impact Python performance.

ABOUT Bhaskar Sunkara

As CTO and SVP of Product Management, Bhaskar Sunkara is responsible for product management, user experience, and field engineering enablement at AppDynamics. He also drives AppDynamics' Customer-centric Innovation methodology to combine customer feedback with fast-paced innovation. Sunkara was an original founder of AppDynamics and served as Director of Engineering responsible for all product development. Prior to joining AppDynamics, Sunkara was Lead Engineer at Wily Technology, where he pioneered a dynamic instrumentation engine as well as the company's product expansion into .NET. Prior to that, he was Lead Engineer for Pramati Technologies, where he was one of the key people behind the design and development of their J2EE Application Server. Sunkara received a BS degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Madras University.

ABOUT Jonah Kowall

As VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics, Jonah Kowall helps drive the AppDynamics product roadmap and vision, while developing entry into new markets and providing valuable technology and business insights to fuel the accelerating and broad-based demand for the company’s Application Intelligence Platform. Kowall has a diverse background including 15 years as an IT practitioner at several startups and larger enterprises focused on infrastructure and operations, security, and performance engineering. These included running tactical and strategic operational initiatives, going deep into monitoring of infrastructure and application components. In 2011, Kowall changed careers, moving to Gartner to focus on availability and performance monitoring and IT operations management (ITOM). He led Gartner's influential Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) Magic Quadrants and research as a Research VP.

ABOUT Kalyan Ramanathan

Kalyan Ramanathan is VP of Product Marketing at AppDynamics. He as more than 20 years of experience in software and marketing, with a deep understanding of the mobile ecosystem and the broader IT operations market. Prior to AppDynamics, he served as CMO at Crittercism, a provider of mobile application performance management (mAPM) solutions. Prior to Crittercism, Ramanathan served as VP of Marketing at Electric Cloud, a DevOps automation leader, and as Senior Director of Product Marketing at Opsware/HP, where he oversaw marketing for HP’s data center automation and application performance management suite. Prior to Opsware, Ramanathan led product marketing and product management at Collation (acquired by IBM) and Portal Software (acquired by Oracle). Ramanathan began his career at Intel and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

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For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

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