application-centric Unified Monitoring solution provides end-to-end visibility and monitoring of applications and business transactions

AppDynamics introduced its Summer ’15 Release (version 4.1), a feature-packed update that brings powerful new capabilities to its Application Intelligence Platform.

Headlining the new release is Unified Monitoring, the 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. Supporting the Unified Monitoring solution are the new general betas of Browser Synthetic Monitoring and Server Monitoring Pro, as well as the general availability of Apache Web Server Monitoring and Python application language support.

AppDynamics Unified Monitoring is built on a single platform, and monitors and manages end-user experience in the context of business transactions. It traces the entire business transaction path from the end-user device/OS, through the application code, databases, third-party API calls, servers, and other infrastructure, and unifies the monitoring of the application through the business transaction context. 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.

Some 65 percent of enterprises report owning 11 or more commercial monitoring/management tools, according to recent research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Maintaining such a stable of disparate, siloed tools can be time- and resource-intensive, and does not provide an integrated view of performance across the application environment, and therefore does not facilitate rapid, proactive issue resolution. AppDynamics Unified Monitoring solves those challenges, as it is built from the ground up specifically to provide a unified, end-to-end view that quickly reveals issues that are impacting business transactions, indicating the real impact of performance on business outcomes.

Unified Monitoring is a future-looking solution that recognizes enterprises’ accelerating dependence on software — the rapid evolution of “software-defined” businesses — and the fact that users are increasingly setting the bar for application functionality and performance. In this new world, a patched-together monitoring toolkit will never be an adequate solution.

“The enterprise toolbox has become extremely cluttered over the years with single-purpose tools,” said Dennis Callaghan, senior analyst, IT operations for 451 Research. “But as enterprises have become more and more driven by software, there’s a compelling need to have an integrated view of everything that impacts application performance. Trying to cobble together that view with various tools doesn’t fully show the dependencies or transaction paths, and doesn't enable agile responses to application issues. Software like AppDynamics Unified Monitoring, that’s purpose-built to monitor the entire application environment through one unified lens, is the future of enterprise application monitoring."

Jyoti Bansal, AppDynamics founder and CEO, summarizes the premise and benefit of Unified Monitoring: “What really sets Unified Monitoring apart is its focus on business transactions and the end user. You can’t understand what the experience is like for the end user by looking at this silo or that silo. You need to have the big picture to see how a transaction is performing from start to finish. If the shopping cart checkout process is slow, what’s making it slow? With Unified Monitoring, we can pinpoint the issues and quickly get to root causes and resolve them. It’s a radically different approach from the old way of looking at infrastructure and trying to piece together the picture. In this new world — where businesses are defined by software — we believe that unified, fully integrated, application-centric monitoring is an absolute must-have.”

In addition to illuminating business impact through its focus on business transactions, AppDynamics Unified Monitoring provides:

■ One unified platform, with one intuitive and consistent user interface, one data platform for everything, one easy install, and easy ongoing management.

■ Flexible deployment options: on-premises, as SaaS, or a hybrid; 73 percent of enterprises rate flexible deployment as important or critical, according to the EMA survey.

■ Role-relevant views to support DevOps collaboration and to give teams situational awareness of areas of responsibility. Examples of role-relevant views include: potential problem issue views for application support teams; role-based views for web and mobile teams and database administrators, showing issues in their domains; and collaboration solutions for DevOps teams.

■ Comprehensive application and infrastructure support for end-user client applications/browsers, application code, message queues, web services/APIs, databases, servers, containers, and third-party extensions; the platform is extensible to support a broad range of components and infrastructure through a robust library of community-contributed extensions.

“We’ve been working toward this for a long time,” Bansal said. “Everything in Unified Monitoring works together because it’s been designed to work together and is architected on a single platform. It’s not stitched together as an afterthought. And now with the addition of Browser Synthetic Monitoring and Server Monitoring, we have a true end-to-end solution, all unified into a single view, a single fully integrated platform.”

Browser Synthetic Monitoring

Summer ’15 Release introduces the public beta availability of Browser Synthetic Monitoring, AppDynamics’ distributed, cloud-based, intelligent monitoring solution for programmatically testing website availability, functionality, and performance. Browser Synthetic Monitoring helps enterprises to be confident that their applications are available and performing to expectations 24/7, even if users are not accessing the application. It simulates end-user requests in real browsers to proactively uncover performance issues independently of real-user load, before users are affected; it is also highly useful for baselining performance for building and measuring SLAs. Based in the cloud and built using the highly regarded WebPageTest technology, Browser Synthetic Monitoring is available for more than two dozen points of presence around the globe, so enterprises can test in their most important geographies. Because it is cloud-based, capacity can be spun up or down as needed, enabling complete flexibility in test scheduling. It joins Browser Real-User Monitoring and Mobile Real-User Monitoring to form AppDynamics’ comprehensive End-User Monitoring Solution.

Server Monitoring

With the Summer ’15 Release, Server Monitoring, AppDynamics’ new server monitoring platform, is available as a public beta. Like the Unified Monitoring solution overall, of which it is a part, Server Monitoring is an application-centric solution that focuses on business transactions as the standard of measurement. 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. Proactive alerts, based on automatic, dynamically generated performance baselines, alert IT teams when performance thresholds are breached, while dramatically reducing false alarms. Configurable health rules and policies enable IT teams to automate resolution of server performance issues. A substantial library of extensions enables monitoring of all infrastructure elements including mainframes, load balancers, containers, and virtual machines. Server Monitoring can be deployed in minutes and requires minimal configuration.

Python Monitoring

Rounding out the highlights of the Summer ’15 Release, AppDynamics announced general availability of its new Python Application Performance Monitoring solution. Python is one of the most popular modern coding languages. 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. Python APM joins AppDynamics’ extensive roster of languages, platforms, and infrastructure supported by Unified Monitoring and the Application Intelligence Platform.