Cisco/AppDynamics upgrade broadens DevOps role in app management game

Cisco’s AppDynamics this week rolled out a developer toolkit that will let corporate development teams quickly build and measure the business impact of Web and mobile applications.

The AppDynamics Developer Toolkit will feature a variety of languages and diagnostic tools that let application teams measure the business impact of new programs.

+More on Network World: Cisco closes AppDynamics deal, increases software weight+

“We expect that the developers toolkit will help customers take real-time application performance data and tie it to business outcomes,” said Matt Chotin, product marketing chief at AppDynamics “It will help enterprises break down silos, become more collaborative and get DevOps more involved in making the business innovative.”

Specifically, the toolkit features:

• AppDynamics for Go (aka Golang) programming language which lets application teams detect errors generated by bad requests, providing better end-to-end coverage across distributed application environments, the company said. Created at Google, Go has become a very popular way to build Web applications.
• Xamarin Support lets mobile application developers embed AppDynamics agents in Apple iOS and Android mobile applications. The idea is to help businesses release mobile applications faster. The company said mobile developers get automatically configured smart alerts that identify new crash types on each version of the application and alert them with aggregated root cause as well as each individual user and session impacted to resolve faster. AppDynamics already supports a variety of programming languages such as C++, Java and .net.
• Android Studio Plugin lets developers automate the instrumentation process for Android applications, reducing errors and making it easier for developers to deliver Android mobile apps.

“The ability to capture more mobile application data in real time lets customers address problems more quickly,” Chotin stated.

+More on Cisco software from Network World: Has Cisco broken out of the network hardware box?+

The package also brings support for deep-code diagnostics for specific business transactions in pre-production and production environments letting developers quickly address bottlenecks and remediate any issues found in testing.

Other key features include:

Smart Crash Alerts — When instrumenting new mobile applications, Smart Crash Alerts are set up by default to save time and effort post-instrumentation. Spend less time configuring alerts.

Unique Crashes in Business iQ — New crash reports in Business iQ, which is the engine for its central App IQ Platform, correlate app crashes to business metrics like conversion rates, revenue or anything else the business tracks. Now app teams have new visibility into crashes so they can prioritize fixing the issues that matter the most to the business.

Mobile Scorecard — Major updates to the mobile scorecard show the metrics that matter, at a glance. The new mobile scorecard makes it easy to see crash rate, number of crashes, network request performance, and error rates for every mobile application.

Health dashboards — Through the use of AppDynamics Query Language (ADQL) in Business iQ, application teams can build powerful dashboards and quickly establish and monitor application health rules.

The AppDynamics Spring ‘17 Release is expected to be available now.

The release is the first upgrade rolled out since Cisco closed its approximately $3.7 billion deal for application analytics specialist March 22. AppDynamics is expected to give the networking giant a nice revenue stream and bolstering its software strategy.

The 9-year-old company – which Cisco bought Jan. 24, days before it was to go IPO — and its almost 1,250 employees are now part of Cisco.

“AppDynamics is special for a number of reasons. It is the largest acquisition we’ve announced since Cisco’s new leadership team was announced 22 months ago. At the time of the IPO, AppDynamics was on track to be the fastest growing publicly traded company in the enterprise software space. AppDynamics represents a great step forward in both our digital transformation and that of our customers and partners. Combining AppDyanmics’ unparalleled analytics with Cisco’s incredible global reach will enable us to accelerate AppDynamics’ success and broaden Cisco’s software offerings, a key area of investment and growth for us,’ wrote Hilton Romanski, senior vice president, Chief Strategy Officer for Cisco in a blog post at the time of closing.