AppDynamics: Keeping Tabs On Apps In The Cloud
Company:
Headquarters: San Francisco, Calif.
Technology Sector: Software
Key Product: AppDynamics 2.0
Year Founded: 2008
Number of Channel Partners: Two in Europe, others in the works
Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise Focused Solution Provider
Why You Should Care: AppDynamics provides the tools needed for businesses to monitor the performance of applications running in today's highly distributed cloud computing environments.
The Lowdown: Applications no longer run only on dedicated servers in tightly controlled data centers. They run in virtualized environments; they are hosted by outside vendors; and they run in the cloud. That can be a problem for IT managers when an application-monitoring system designed for on-premise applications fails to detect the faltering performance of a cloud-based, transaction-processing application.
As businesses adopt a new generation of cloud-based applications, so grows the need for a new generation of application performance management (APM) tools to monitor and manage those applications. Cloud applications need the same level of reliability as on-premise applications, said AppDynamics marketing vice president Steve Roop. "That's a big gap we're filling in the market right now."
APM tools on the market today weren't designed for on-demand applications based on service-oriented architectures (SOA), argued Jyoti Bansal, AppDynamics CEO, in a recent interview. "APM 1.0" systems, as he calls the older tools, generally monitor applications running on a single server, while today's transaction-processing systems might include any number of loosely coupled cloud applications. And given that cloud applications can scale up far more than on-premise applications, APM systems need to scale with them, he said.
Bansal, who led the design efforts for several application performance management products at Wily Technology (now owned by CA), founded AppDynamics in 2008 to answer that need.
AppDynamics 2.0, which began shipping last month (replacing the company's first release that debuted in Sept. 2009), provides IT managers with real-time visibility into the performance of distributed applications. It monitors applications running in cloud, virtual and physical/on-premise environments. It also monitors the network connections between applications and provides "deep diagnostic" capabilities (down to examining software code) to find the root causes of performance problems, Bansal said.
The new release of the AppDynamics product incorporates a policy engine, which sets performance thresholds for monitored applications and defines policies for dealing with problems, and an orchestration engine that automates responses to detected issues. The system learns performance patterns of specific applications to better distinguish between degraded performance and one-time anomalies. And it helps scale applications up and down to meet capacity demands.
The AppDynamics product itself can be run on-premise, or as a hosted or cloud application.
AppDynamics has just started to leverage the channel to expand its sales and is recruiting managed service providers and solution providers that focus on application performance management, Roop said. Other candidates include cloud computing service providers and software platform vendors who can combine the AppDynamics product with their application servers and messaging software.