AppDynamics offers the next-generation of application performance management technology that thrives in virtual, cloud environments.
Start-up AppDynamics offers application performance management software for distributed applications hosted in physical, virtual and cloud environments.
Managing application performance challenges even the most adept IT professionals, and now with virtual systems and cloud computing taking hold across enterprise IT shops, the task becomes more daunting – which is why a new approach is needed, according to the founders of AppDynamics.
Tracking application performance virtually everywhere
AppDynamics, a San Francisco start-up founded by former Wily Technology executives, this week announced the availability of its flagship software, AppDynamics 2.0, which company executives say is designed to handle the challenges of managing application performance in virtual, cloud and service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments.
“Application performance management has to be made exponentially simpler. As the complexity of the environment grows and applications become more distributed, the complexity of performance management should not increase,” says Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics.
AppDynamics 2.0 uses software agents installed on servers, and virtual images, and those agents communicate with an AppDynamics management server, also installed in the environment. The software discovers the application topology, including application dependencies and relationships with other elements in the environment. IT managers work with the software to identify key business transactions to be monitored, and Bansal says, AppDynamics learns the environment and its normal behavior.
“The agents create a picture of the environment and automatically refresh that picture when changes are made. It provides instant triage and diagnostics when changes happen,” Bansal explains. “It could be likened to a Google traffic map.”
AppDynamics 2.0 provides wide visibility for distributed applications, but also deep diagnostic capabilities to help IT manager determine the root cause of performance problems. With the second generation of its flagship product, AppDynamics added cloud orchestration capabilities, which the company says allow IT managers to provision application resources to respond to real-time demand and service-level requirements. Another updated feature uses dynamic baseline and performance patter analysis capabilities to detect significant performance problems and capture diagnostic sessions. And event coverage technology helps IT managers catch memory leaks, stalls, deadlocks, threat contention issues and database connection pool health statistics, the company says.
Competitors include management software heavyweights such as CA, which acquired Wily Technology, and HP and its technology acquired with Mercury Interactive as well as fellow newcomer Makara, which uses virtualization technology to manage application performance in cloud environments.
“People have started moving mission-critical applications to virtual systems and cloud environments, and that means a new breed of application performance management technology is required,” Bansal says.
Available now, pricing for AppDynamics 2.0 starts at $5,000.
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