The Power of Deep Code Insights
March 30, 2020

Jina Na
AppDynamics

Share this

The rise of technologies like cloud computing and automated delivery pipelines has enabled teams to deliver software at breakneck speed. In fact, top tech companies deploy software hundreds, even thousands of times per day, raising the bar for digital services. To stay competitive, organizations in every industry must match the pace of innovation set by these digital-native companies.

However, it's challenging to maintain heterogeneous applications and ensure that service is not only available, but also delighting users and driving business outcomes. From the front-end experience to back-end architecture, a web of third-party services, legacy data centers and a distributed, multi cloud infrastructure are supporting the application.

If you're unable to effectively manage these complex application environments, your business is impacted — an outage leads to poor user experience which leads to lost business and impact to your organizational productivity and resources. Take for instance what recently happened with the Iowa caucus app. Coding issues led to significant delays in counting and reporting important primary results, which led other states, such as Nevada, to pull two previously developed apps for their own primary elections, losing out on tens of thousands of dollars.

This example shows that while deployment velocity has increased exponentially, traditional approaches to troubleshooting fall short when it comes to equipping developers (and IT teams) with enough information to pinpoint the root cause of application code issues.

In fact, according to Stripe Research, developers spend roughly 17.3 hours each week debugging, refactoring and modifying bad code — valuable time that could be spent writing more code, shipping better products and innovating. The bottom line? Nearly $300B (US) in lost developer productivity every year.

What happened in Iowa is just one example of how developers are often blamed for code level issues, issues that with the right level of insight could reveal what's causing a bug in production before impacting the digital experience for customers.

So what's the solution and what opportunities would developers suddenly benefit from if they spent more time writing code and less time debugging?

The Aha Moments — What Code Level Insights Bring to Life

The job of a developer is never ending given business priorities and product roadmaps. For those battling issues in monolithic environments or in highly distributed, microservices-based applications, code level insights greatly improve software delivery efficiency by enabling developers to spend less time debugging and more time delivering world-class software.

Specifically, today, once developers ship their code, access to the application and data is restricted. This means that most dev teams are forced to rely on time and resource intensive logging to collect the critical data needed to understand the cause of any performance impact.

Instead of this time intensive, often manual process, by leveraging code-level insights, developers are able to capture critical data and context, on-demand. This level of insight, means, developers have access to data and can collect the necessary information when they need to in order to pinpoint what's causing an issue. As a result, developers have witnessed a decrease in MTTR, improving the overall IT efficiency of their teams, a tighter alignment between Operations and Development teams and according to recent studies, a 25 percent improvement in developer productivity, freeing up valuable time to focus on releasing new features.

Armed with time back, developers can focus on building market-differentiating products that drive user experience, customer satisfaction, and business priorities. This is especially key for organizations competing with younger, digital-native companies.

Jina Na is Associate Product Marketing Manager at AppDynamics
Share this

The Latest

September 26, 2023

Generative AI may be a great tool for the enterprise to help drive further innovation and meaningful work, but it also runs the risk of generating massive amounts of spam that will counteract its intended benefits. From increased AI spam bots to data maintenance due to large volumes of outputs, enterprise AI applications can create a cascade of issues that end up detracting from productivity gains ...

September 25, 2023

A long-running study of DevOps practices ... suggests that any historical gains in MTTR reduction have now plateaued. For years now, the time it takes to restore services has stayed about the same: less than a day for high performers but up to a week for middle-tier teams and up to a month for laggards. The fact that progress is flat despite big investments in people, tools and automation is a cause for concern ...

September 21, 2023

Companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes overall, according to 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders, a report from SolarWinds ...

September 20, 2023

IT leaders are driving an increasing number of automation initiatives as a way to stay competitive, reduce costs and scale as they navigate an unpredictable social and economic environment, according to the 2023 State of Automation in IT survey conducted by Jitterbit ...

September 19, 2023

Customer loyalty is changing as retailers get increasingly competitive. More than 75% of consumers say they would end business with a company after a single bad customer experience. This means that just one price discrepancy, inventory mishap or checkout issue in a physical or digital store, could have customers running out to the next store that can provide them with better service. Retailers must be able to predict business outages in advance, and act proactively before an incident occurs, impacting customer experience ...

September 18, 2023
Digital transformation is key to ensuring companies keep up with the competitive market landscape. Putting digital at the core of a business can significantly reduce operating expenses and inefficiencies. However, this process often means changing the way internal teams work with one another. To help with the transition, this blog offers chief experience officers (CXOs) advice on how to lead a successful digital transformation project ...
September 14, 2023

Earlier this year, New Relic conducted a study on observability ... The 2023 Observability Forecast reveals observability's impact on the lives of technical professionals and businesses' bottom lines. Here are 10 key takeaways from the forecast ...

September 13, 2023
On September 10, MGM Resorts experienced what it called a "cybersecurity issue" that had a major impact on the company's systems, showing how cyberattacks can bring down applications, ultimately causing problems for a company in many ways ...
September 12, 2023

Only 33% of executives are "very confident" in their ability to operate in a public cloud environment, according to the 2023 State of CloudOps report from NetApp. This represents an increase from 2022 when only 21% reported feeling very confident ...

September 11, 2023

The majority of organizations across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) breached over the last year had personally identifiable information (PII) compromised, but most have not yet modified their data management policies, according to the Cybersecurity and PII Report from ManageEngine ...