Today I spent some time reading up on AppDynamics. It is one of the most popular APM tools on the market. Back in the day when I worked at Edward Jones, I spent quite a few years on the performance tuning of Joneslink, which used Oracle WebCenter technology at the time. So APM is a dear topic in my heart, and I wanted to see what values the latest APM tool can provide to enterprises.
Why APM
Speaking of values, we often refer to infrastructure as below the value line, but we overlook the fact that spending time on troubleshooting /improving performance is below the value line as well. You are not adding any extra values to your line of business; you are just repairing what’s broken. At the end of the day, your CIO is not going to pat your shoulder and tell you what a great job you did by spending weeks to fix that bug or months to improve the average response time of a critical e-commerce site. Your e-commerce site was expected to perform well and be bug free in the first place! APM tools are production monitoring solutions that allow for quicker time to value. Reducing MMTR (Mean Time to Repair) is one of the most critical aspects to ensure applications’ availability in production and save the expensive IT resource cost. So developers can focus on what they love to do, which is writing software and innovating, instead of what they don’t want to do, which is troubleshooting. Moreover, APM tools can provide business data to business owners. It helps reduce the Mean Time to Business Awareness. How fast can your business team be aware of the business changes and take actions? The traditional BI tool will not be able to keep up with the real time changes and consequently it may cause businesses to make decisions based on old data. The real time business monitoring capability of a good APM tool allows business units to gain real time insights of business performance. It’s all about how fast you can innovate and APM can help businesses focus, take the best course of action, and drive better business outcomes.
Why AppDyanmics
I have seen some APM tools before such as Oracle EM and PCF metrics, so I didn’t think I was going to be surprised by how much more AppD can do. But, Wow! After seeing a quick demo and playing with it a bit myself, I had to admit that I was very impressed. Several strong values that I see AppD’s sales team can really leverage when presenting this tool in front of customers include:
Transaction focused rather than Metrics focused
Instead of having your developers go through hundreds or thousands of underlying metrics, then sort them out and figure out which are actually related to the end-user activities, AppD automatically discovers individual business transactions such as checking out and constructs a complete view of the application topology. You can easily understand the flow through your environment in a transaction flow map and correlate the application call stacks with user activities. I can still remember the struggle I went through when troubleshooting the performance issue with Joneslink. After we identified the long running query by using CA Wily, we still couldn’t tie that query with the user activity. We spoke with Oracle many times and asked them if they had any tools to help correlate backend log data with front end user activity, and the answer was “not yet”. Had we had a tool like AppD, it would have saved us months of troubleshooting just one performance issue.
Distributed transaction visibility
AppD offers great visibility into distributed transactions. Distributed tracing is crucial for orchestrating many services across a complex multi-cloud ecosystem and understanding the connections among services and user experience. The end-to-end visibility allows you to easily identify a poorly performing business transaction and drill down to the root cause. Then you can escalate the issue to the right team with valuable information collected by AppD. Moreover, Web User Experience helps you see what the user is experiencing in a browser or mobile device in case there is some network issues or excessive browser processing that could impact end-user experience. Its dashboard gives a high-level aggregate view of requests, response time and overall end user experience.
Scalability
Each AppD controller can support up to 15,000 application nodes. It really provides a single-glass-pane platform to monitor applications for large-scale enterprises.
Low overhead
Overhead of an instrumentation tool is a common problem. When we were troubleshooting the performance of Joneslink back in 2009, the instrumentation tool (Wily at the time) added so much overhead in production, it was pretty much useless. Every time we tried to use the tool to collect the data, it killed the JVM. AppD has less than 2% Low overheads added to applications in production. This means you keep your systems up.
Health Rules and Actions
In my troubleshooting days, when there was a problem in production, we had to reproduce it in a pre-prod environment first, then either use some low level Unix analytic tools such as truss or collect thread dumps (Wily’s licenses were used in production) to troubleshoot. In AppD, you can set some Health Rules in production. When these rules are violated, the system can send out notifications, start to collect snapshots and create diagnostic sessions. So you can go back to these snapshots and quickly diagnose and determine the root cause. Also some remediation can take place right away. For example, if there are too many major garbage collections and they cause hang-ups, the app restart script will be automatically executed. This auto-correction feature frees up resources to address more urgent problems.
Business analytics
AppD has a lot of insights about your applications. Besides all the performance-related information, it also offers information that’s business-related. So you can find out how well the business is or isn’t performing. All the transaction data can be easily collected and turned into graphs that have business meanings. For example, you can find out which age group of customers made the most purchases on this new product. Then you can run a campaign and offer coupons to the same group and entice them to shop more. Also, in the same way how you set up health rules for your performance health, you can set health rules and actions for your business health . So application intelligence is built into the platform to support business decisions. This means that you can save cost and time and make better business decisions based on real-time data.
Business IQ
In Fall 2016, AppD has released 3 new features: funnel analysis, user sessions and advanced ADQL. A funnel analysis with user sessions information allows businesses to see how many users go through each step of an e-commerce site and the percentage of conversion rate of each webpage or mobile page. From the highest level of dashboard on business health to the lowest call graphs, businesses can easily identify the root cause of an underperforming conversion step and go back to customers who didn’t get converted and win them back by maybe offering more discounts. The conversion analysis function not only tremendously saves business and IT operation cost, it also adds huge values to a business’s innovation capacity.
Jenny’s notes
I wish I had used AppDynamics for troubleshooting applications back in my troubleshooting days. It would have saved me months, possibly even years, of hard, tedious work going through thousands of lines of logs and trying to figure things out. We used to have daily hotline or war room. It was bad. We had to rolling bounce our application everyday. Because I was the project manager and technical lead, I got paged all the time including nights and weekends. Speaking of blood, sweat, and tears, and time away from family, they would have been all avoided if I had had a tool like AppDynamics. (Disclaimer: I was not the one who chose Oracle Webcenter as the intranet content management tool. Stellent was chosen by other architects who previously worked there. Stellent was bought out by Oracle.) I also see the potentials of AppDynamics business IQ. It may not replace everything in a BI tool, but critical business performance can be easily measured by a conversion analysis, and the possibilities of taking intelligent business actions to improve the conversation rate are limitless. One more thing that’s worth noting is that AppDynamics has been integrated with PCF seamlessly. With the world class AppDynamics service on the market, folks can easily bind their apps to AppDynamics and truly enjoy what PCF has to offer and the values AppDynamics provides. At the end of the day, we want to only focus on what’s above the value line: innovate fast without worrying about anything else.