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Tag: appdynamics

Performance Monitoring, another view

This is my first post to devopsy.kinsta.cloud, for those who haven’t read my other writings, I currently work as the VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics. I joined in February 2015 after being at Gartner for 4 years as a Research VP covering all things monitoring. During my time as a Gartner analyst I would help buyers make decisions about purchasing monitoring software. When I read articles on the internet which blatantly disregard best practices I either smell that something is fishy (sponsorship) or they just didn’t follow a process. Conversely some people do follow a proper process. I specifically wrote this up due to reading a really fishy article.

Step 1 – Admit it

The first step to determining you have a problem is admitting it. Most monitoring tool buyers realize they have too many tools, and none of them help isolate root cause. This is a result of most buying happening at the infrastructure layer, when the application layer is either lightly exercised synthetically or disregarded. People soon realize you must find an application layer monitoring tool, or write your own instrumentation. The vendors who sell logging software would love for you to generate a lot of rich logs, so they can help you solve problems, but realistically this doesn’t work in most enterprises as they are using a combination of custom and packaged software, and forcing developers to write consistent logging is a frustrating and futile task.

Step 2 – Document it

The next phase is to document what you are using today, most organizations have over 10 monitoring tools, and they typically want to buy another one. As they consider APM tools they should document what they have today, and determine a plan to consolidate and eliminate redundant tools. Having tools within silos will happen until you can fix the organizational structure.

Step 3 – Requirements

I can’t tell you how many times vendors set requirements for buyers. You can tell when vendors do this versus actually understanding the requirements the user has, and if the solution will scale and be operable by the team. Purchasing a tool which requires full time consultants on staff to keep it running is no longer feasible today, sorry to the old big ITOM vendors (formerly the big-4) but people don’t want that anymore.

Step 4 – Test it!

If you are evaluating software you MUST test it, and make sure it works in your environment. Better yet load test the software to determine if the vendors claims of overhead and visibility are in fact true. I see far too many people buy software they do not test.

Getting back to the article which prompted this post:

https://devopsy.kinsta.cloud/features/devops-style-performance-monitoring-for-net/

The author is located in Austria and I believe there is a connection to Dynatrace. Dynatraces’ R&D and technical leadership are in Austria, but this is just conjecture. The article is written with a bias, which is obvious to any reader who has used these tools. The evaluator did not test these products, or if he did he didn’t have a testing methodology.

Finally the author’s employer is new and all employees have come from Automic Software in the past year. I don’t need to explain to those who work with Automic the state of things there. http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Automic-Software-Reviews-E269431.htm#

I think I’ve spent enough time on the background, here are my specific issues with the content.

The screenshots are taken from various websites, and are not current or accurate. If someone writes an evaluation of technology, at least test it, and use your screenshots from the testing!

This post was specifically to discuss DevOps, but yet the author doesn’t discuss the need to monitor microservices or asynchronous application patterns, which are clearly the current architecture of choice. This is especially the case in DevOps or continuous release environments. In fact Microsoft themselves announced new products last week at Ignite including nano server, and Azure Fabric Service for building these patterns. The difficulty with microservices is that each request externally spawns a large number of internal requests, these often start and stop out of order creating issues when monitoring these. This causes major issues for APM products, and very few handle this effectively today.

The article calls out user interface and deployment models inconsistently, and fails to mention Dynatrace is an on-premises software product. Dynatrace is also a thick Java client, built on Eclipse. This is the definition of a heavy client, which the author calls out for other products in this article.

Continuing the incorrect facts in this article the author calls out Dell (formerly Quest) Foglight. This is not Dell’s current product for modern architectures. Dell has moved to a SaaS product called Foglight APM SaaS, which is not what was evaluated. The evaluator should look at the current product (noticing a trend here).

Finally the AppDynamics review is inaccurate:

Editors note: the following is this authors opinions, not the opinions of devopsy.kinsta.cloud. As the author states, he is employed by AppDynamics.

“code level visibility may be limited here to reduce overhead.”

The default in order to scale AppDynamics to monitor thousands of systems with one single on premises controller (something no other APM vendor delivers) is done based on advanced smart instrumentation, but every transaction is monitored and measured. All products do limit the amount of data they request in some way. AppDynamics has several modes including one which captures full call traces for every execution.

“ lack of IIS request visibility”

AppDynamics provides excellent visibility to IIS requests, I’m not sure what the author means here. AppDynamics also supports implementation on Azure using nuget.

“features walk clock time with no CPU breakdown”

Once again, I’m not sure what the author is referring to here. The product provides several ways of viewing CPU usage.

“Its flash-based web UI and rather cumbersome agent configuration”

The agent installation is no different than other products, showing the author has not installed the product. Finally the product is HTML5, and has been for a while, there are still some flash views in configuration screens, but those are being removed with each release. I’d much rather have a web based UI with a little remaining flash than a fat client UI requiring a large download.

AppDynamics has a single UI which goes far deeper into database performance than the other products in this review. AppDynamics also provides far more capabilities than what was highlighted in this article including synthetic. AppDynamics provides deployment of the same software via SaaS or on premises installation.

Finally this review did not look at analytics, which is clearly an area of increasing demand within APM. That being said this review is far from factual or useful.

Hopefully this sets some of this straight, please leave comments here, or @jkowall on twitter!

Thanks.

May 20, 2015
DevOps style performance monitoring for .NET

Editors note: This article represents the authors own opinions on the tools he mentions. We welcome others to join in the conversation about their opinions and experiences with these tools and similar ones. Important to note that they do not represent the opinion or beliefs of devopsy.kinsta.cloud or its editors.

Recently I began looking for an application performance management solution for .NET. My requirements are code level visibility, end to end request tracing, and infrastructure monitoring in a DevOps production setup.

DotTrace is clearly the most well-known tool for code level visibility in development setups, but it can’t be used in a 24×7 production setup. DotTrace also doesn’t do typical Ops monitoring.

Unfortunately a Google search didn’t return much in terms of a tool comparison for .NET production monitoring. So I decided to do some research on my own. Following is a short list of well-known tools in the APM space that support .NET. My focus is on finding an end-to-end solution and profiler-like visibility into transactions.

New Relic was the first to do APM SaaS, focused squarely on production with a complete offering. New Relic offers web request monitoring for .NET, Java, and more. It automatically shows a component-based breakdown of the most important requests. The breakdown is fairly intuitive to use and goes down to the SQL level. Code level visibility, at least for .NET, is achieved by manually starting and stopping sampling. This is fine for analyzing currently running applications, but makes analysis of past problems a challenge. New Relic’s main advantage is its ease of us, intuitive UI, and a feature set that can help you quickly identify simple issues. Depth is the main weakness of NewRelic. As soon as you try to dig deeper into the data, you’re stuck. This might be a minor point, but if you’re used to working with a profiler, you’ll miss CPU breakdown as New Relic only shows response times.

Dynatrace is the vendor that started the APM revolution and is definitely the strongest horse in this race. Its feature set in terms of .NET is the most complete, offering code level monitoring (including CPU and wait times), end to end tracing, and user experience monitoring. As far as I can determine, it’s the only tool with a memory profiler for .NET and it also features IIS web request insight. It supports the entire application life cycle from development environments, to load testing, to production. As such it’s nearly perfect for DevOps. Due to its pricing structure and architecture it’s targeted more at the mid to enterprise markets. In terms of ease of use it’s catching up to competition with a new Web UI. It’s rather light on infrastructure monitoring on its own, but shows additional strength with optional Dynatrace synthetic and network monitoring components.

Ruxit is a new SaaS solution built by Dynatrace. It’s unique in that it unites application performance management and real user monitoring with infrastructure, cloud, and network monitoring into a single product. It is by far the easiest to install, literally takes 2 minutes. It features full end to end tracing, code level visibility down to the method level, SQL visibility, and RUM for .NET, Java, and other languages, with insight into IIS and Apache. Apart from this it has an analytics engine that delivers both technical and user experience insights. Its main advantages are its ease of use, web UI, fully automated root cause analysis, and frankly, amazing breadth. Its flexible consumption based pricing scales from startups, cloud natives, and mid markets up to large web scale deployments of ten-thousands of servers.

AppNetta‘s TraceView takes a different approach to application performance management. It does support tracing across most major languages including database statements and of course .NET. It visualizes things in charts and scatter plots. Even traces across multiple layers and applications are visualized in graphs. This has its advantages but takes some time getting used to it. Unfortunately while TraceView does support .NET it does not yet have code level visibility for it. This makes sense for AppNetta, which as a whole is more focused on large scale monitoring and has more of a network centric background. For DevOps in .NET environments however, it’s a bit lacking.

Foglight, originally owned by Quest and now owned by Dell, is a well-known application performance management solution. It is clearly meant for operations monitoring and tracks all web requests. It integrates infrastructure and application monitoring, end to end tracing, and code level visibility on .NET, among other things. It has the required depth, but it’s rather complex to set up and obviously generates alert storms as far as I could experience. It takes a while to configure and get the data you need. Once properly set up though, you get a lot of insight into your .NET application. In a fast moving DevOps scenario though it might take too long to manually adapt to infrastructure changes.

AppDynamics is well known in the APM space. Its offering is quite complete and it features .NET monitoring, quite nice transaction flow tracing, user experience, and code level profiling capabilities. It is production capable, though code level visibility may be limited here to reduce overhead. Apart from these features though, AppDynamics has some weaknesses, mainly the lack of IIS request visibility and the fact that it only features walk clock time with no CPU breakdown. Its flash-based web UI and rather cumbersome agent configuration can also be counted as negatives. Compared to others it’s also lacking in terms of infrastructure monitoring. Its pricing structure definitely targets the mid market.

Manage Engine has traditionally focused on IT monitoring, but in recent years they added end user and application performance monitoring to their portfolio called APM Insight. Manage Engine does give you metric level insight into .NET applications and transaction trace snap shots which give you code level stack traces and database interactions. However it’s apparent that Manage Engine is a monitoring tool and APM insight doesn’t provide the level of depth one might be accustomed to from other APM tools and profilers.

JenniferSoft is a monitoring solution that provides nice real-time dashboarding and gives an overview of the topology of your environment. It enables users to see deviations in the speed of transactions with real time scatter charts and analysis of transactions. It provides “profiling” for IIS/.NET transactions, but only on single tiers and has no transaction tracing. Their strong suit is clearly cool dashboarding but not necessarily analytics. For example, they are the only vendor that features 3D animated dashboards.

Conclusion: There’s more buzz around on the APM space than a Google search would reveal on first sight and I did actually discover some cool vendors to target my needs; however, the field clears up pretty much when you dig for end-2-end visibility from code down to infrastructure, including RUM, any web service requests and deep SQL insights. And if you want to pair that with a nice, fluent, ease-of-use web UI and efficient analytics, there’s actually not many left …

About the Author/ Thomas Kunz:

I am an innovation architect focusing on IT in the context of the disruptive changes through the convergence of Social, Mobile, Information and Cloud and digital business transformations. After more than 20 years of experiencing one of the biggest IT enterprises in the world and its projects, programs and people, I am now helping customers overcoming the challenges through the omnipresent trend of digitalization. Follow me here http://twitter.com/@thom1309 or find me at my blog http://blog.smile-it.at or at http://www.productwings.com

April 28, 2015
The real cost of downtime
Stephen Elliot and the IDC team recently released a report (registration required) sponsored by AppDynamics that examines the true cost of downtime and infrastructure failure, as well as DevOps adoption. The headline numbers are pretty eye-opening:
- For the Fortune 1000, the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion.
- The average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour.
- The average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million.
Let those numbers just sink in a moment. Between $1 to $2.5 billion lost to application downtime a year! That is a big number, but if you look at the follow on numbers you can see how you can get there. Infrastructure failure has an average hourly cost of $100k per hour, critical application failure has an average hourly cost of $500k to $1m per hour. It doesn’t take a lot of hours for those numbers to add up. You can read in the report the actual math IDC applied to reach these conclusions based on the responses to a survey they undertook.

There was also some good insight into DevOps and DevOps tools adoption. Remember this was aimed at the Fortune 1000 market segment, so large enterprises. About 43% of respondents were using DevOps currently, with another 40% planning on adopting DevOps soon. That 83% number is in line with another recent survey by CA that showed an 88% number.

But all is not as rosy as that picture paints. When looking at the biggest impediments to DevOps, the usual suspects rear their ugly heads:
- Cultural inhibitors – 56.7%
- Fragmented processes – 43.3%
- Lack of executive support – 26.7%
All three of these topics have been the fodder for stories here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud. There are specific strategies to overcome each of these, but the fact is they are still major obstacles to successful DevOps adoption despite overwhelming desire to do so.

There was another interesting metric in the study that bears noting as well. It is about companies who try to use their existing tool sets in a DevOps setting. There is something like an 80% failure rate for companies who try to adapt their existing tools for DevOps practices. That screams out something that many a man already knows, “you need the right tool to do the job right.” The moral of that story is if you are going DevOps you damn better be buying some DevOps specific tools to get the job done right.

Again in line with other surveys I have seen the biggest initiatives driving DevOps adoption are:
- Automation 60%
- Continuous delivery 50%
- Continuous integration 43.3%
- Automated testing 43.3%
- Application monitoring/management 43.3%
DevOps was being initiated by slightly more development teams that IT Ops teams by about a 40% to 33% margin respectively.

You can download the full report from the link at the top of the story to get the rest of the data. Ultimately like similar surveys there are some assumptions that you have to swallow in order to give credence to the findings. For me the biggest grains of salt to consider are:
1. This survey was based on a relatively small amount of respondents. On average like 50 per question and some of those not from organizations in the scope of the survey. With that small a group trends could be skewed by a handful of outlier responses.
2. While IDC is a very reputable company, the fact is this was a sponsored survey by a DevOps tool vendor. AppDynamics likewise is a reputable company (and in full disclosure a sponsor here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud), nevertheless it is something you should take into consideration.
3. Perhaps the biggest grain is: Do you buy their math in calculating downtime? According the report’s authors here is how they arrived at their numbers:
To examine application downtime impact per year across the Fortune 1000, we conducted the

following analysis:
- 1,000 companies multiplied by an average of 250 critical applications per company equals 250,000 total applications. 250,000 multiplied by an average of $500 to $1 million per hour of downtime cost equals $1.25 billion to 2.5 billion of unplanned application downtime costs per year.
That sounds like back of napkin stuff to me. But really at the end of the day whether the number is $1b, $2b or more, suffice to say it is a big number.

Surveys like these continue to contribute to a broader understanding of the DevOps market. It also provides cover to IT executives seeking support to kick off DevOps in their own organizations. Hopefully we are approaching a critical mass of data that will make the job of “selling” DevOps up the org chart an easier sell.

UPDATE:

Here’s a great upcoming webinar that will include thought leadership from Stephen Elliot, VP of analyst firm IDC on “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime” based on research of Fortune 1000 companies. Register for it now, here.
February 11, 2015
Collaborate more effectively with AppDynamics DevOps Virtual War Room

DevOps enables companies to move faster—but moving faster is not a worthy goal in and of itself. Organizations have to be able to develop and deploy solutions that are effective as well as expedient. It’s important to be able to monitor and respond to events in real time to ensure everything is running optimally, and to be able to create and implement fixes as quickly as possible when it’s not.

At its AppSphere 2014 conference held in Las Vegas earlier this month, AppDynamics announced the latest release of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence platform—which is designed to help make application intelligence available so businesses can run faster, leaner, and more efficient. One unique element of the latest release is a new DevOps Virtual War Room.

An AppDynamics press release describes the DevOps Virtual War Room. “It enables IT operations, development teams and business users to see and resolve problems together in a shared virtual space. The new release also enables scheduled, auto-delivered reports, and adds a new iOS app that sends push notifications to team members when system alerts are triggered.”

Unless you can get all parties in one room, reviewing the same information, and discussing the issues and potential solutions, troubleshooting can easily devolve into chaos. Mixing various forms of communication—phone calls, emails, instant messaging, face-to-face, etc.—results in a modern day business form of the children’s game “telephone”. Statements get twisted, and bits and pieces of information get lost in translation as various parties attempt to work together.

The DevOps Virtual War Room strives to change that dynamic by giving teams—even geographically separated teams—a single virtual space where all parties can come together to collaborate. Everyone sees the same data, and the individuals can discuss options and make changes to application settings and configurations together in real-time.

Another benefit of the DevOps Virtual War Room is that it maintains a log of the communications and the changes that have been made. Valuable information about the root cause of the issue, the troubleshooting process, and the changes made to implement an effective solution are captured so that there is an audit trail to refer to if additional problems arise, as well as a historical archive that can server as a reference for future issues. The data collected from the DevOps Virtual War Room can be captured and indexed in knowledge management systems in order to streamline access in the future.

“We’ve all seen the tremendously positive impact the DevOps phenomenon has had. With our new Virtual War Room and the other tools introduced today, we are catalyzing DevOps collaboration for troubleshooting, as well as application development, in ways that no other APM platform can do,” explained AppDynamics CEO Jyoti Bansal. “Performance isn’t just about technology, as critical as that is—it’s also very much about people working together closely to get things done faster and more effectively.”

To be fair, there are a variety of other ways to accomplish a similar goal. Any number of Web conferencing or virtual whiteboard tools—including things like Skype for Business or Google Hangouts—could serve as a virtual meeting places where developers, operations, business stakeholders, and others could “meet” virtually to get things done. One aspect that makes the AppDynamics DevOps Virtual War Room different—if not better—is that it also brings the relevant data and information to the table, and presents it in a way that enables the individuals to analyze the problem and devise a solution.

November 13, 2014
Webinar: DevOps in the Modern Enterprise
We are happy to announce the next devopsy.kinsta.cloud webinar. In partnership with AppDynamics and Citrix :

DevOps in the Modern Enterprise

DevOps has been embraced by companies ranging from small e-commerce providers to large fortune 100 institutions. As the rate of adoption continues to grow there is still much confusion about how to successfully transition from “DevOps curious” to full fledged “DevOps practice”. Jim Hirschauer, Technology Evangelist with AppDynamics, will discuss the role of software tools in fostering a successful DevOps practice. Spencer Schwab, Staff DevOps Engineer with Citrix, will share his experience in transitioning his organization into a DevOps centric practice. Spencer will expose the challenges associated with shifting towards DevOps as well as the solutions he discovered while leading and participating in this experience with all of it’s ups and downs. You’ll learn how to initiate change within your organization as well as the associated pitfalls and benefits of the DevOps journey, all based upon the real word experience that Spencer brings from Citrix. One attendee will win a $100 Amazon gift card. You must be present to win

Date: October 30th

Time: 1pm eastern, 10am pacific
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REGISTRATION LINK: (Limited registration, so don't wait!) 
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About the Speakers:

Spencer Schwab – Currently, as an Operations Application Owner at Citrix, Spencer leads a Dev/Ops team that is responsible for the availability, run state, capacity, and configuration of the GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToTraining products in production. Prior to Citrix, he spent eight and a half years working for Fedex where he designed and implemented many high-availability solutions to support the company of over 300,000 employees. He also has served as the Director of Systems Management for Message Factors Inc. and has worked for several small technology firms. Spencer always enjoys a troubleshooting challenge and thrives under pressure. When not working hard, Spencer enjoys spending time with family, cooking, gardening, and riding the waves on his boogie board.

Jim Hirschauer – Technology evangelist for AppDynamics, Jim Hirschauer has an extensive background in highly available, business critical, large enterprise IT operations environments. Jim has been interested in application performance testing and monitoring since his days as a systems administrator in a retail bank. His passion for performance analysis led him down a path to design, implement, and manage the cloud computing monitoring architecture for a top-ten investment bank. During his tenure at the bank, Jim created new processes and procedures that reduced the time spent in the test and QA cycle while simultaneously increasing overall code release quality and dramatically improving end user experience.
October 7, 2014
Monitor mobile apps behavior with freemium tool from AppDynamics

One of the core elements of DevOps is rapid development. Organizations remove obstacles, and function more efficiently to compress timeframes and evolve in real time. In order to be more effective, though, you also need to have real-time feedback on the existing app experience so you can adapt on the fly. AppDynamics wants to provide that with a new self-service freemium version of its Mobile Real-User Monitoring (RUM) platform.

Free mobile crash analytics puts powerful data into the hands of mobile app developers who want to understand the critical failures that drive users away from their app and damage credibility, whether it’s the latest game or a business enterprise app. AppDynamics Mobile RUM enables mobile developers to quickly identify unique and recurring crashes for specific devices, operating systems, or carrier types, and fix them before they become pervasive.

“If you don’t know what your mobile users are doing or know at what point and why your mobile app is crashing, you’re essentially flying blind in the brave new mobile world. With millions of apps available on the Apple and Android app stores, customers have little patience for a poor mobile experience. Not only does the poor mobile app hurt revenues, but it also hurts brand perception” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics in a press release statement. “With such rich mobile app performance management capabilities available in the market today, there is no reason businesses should leave their brand experience to chance. With free mobile crash analytics, you can quickly pinpoint the causes of mobile crashes and get them fixed before your users defect in droves.”

AppDynamics launched a free, self-service, 15-day trial of the full-featured version of the enhanced mobile RUM product today. After the 15 days expires the full-featured professional version converts to a limited functionality lite version and continues to provide users with valuable mobile crash analytics data entirely free, forever. The freemium offering provides the crash analytics capabilities for free, with data retention for a 365-day period. Mobile developers can flashback up to a year to learn from historical trends and patterns.

The full-featured professional version includes a variety of additional features and capabilities, like mobile business transaction correlation, enhanced mobile end-user experience management, and mobile behavior analytics. AppDynamics Mobile RUM can be deployed locally on-premise, or as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering.

Bansal added, “Mobile is an essential component for software-defined businesses. That’s why it’s an essential component of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence platform as well. AppDynamics enables customers to move seamlessly from mobile data to server data, from smartphone to PC, so they have command of performance and reap actionable intelligence at every level.”

You can use the lite version, and leverage the benefits of free mobile app crash analytics forever. If you want the features and capabilities of the more comprehensive professional version, AppDynamics Mobile Real User Monitoring costs $3,000 per year for every 5,000 monthly active users.

Whether or not the feature in the professional version are worth the cost for your organization, it’s hard to argue with free. If you develop mobile apps, you should at least take a look at the data that AppDynamics Mobile RUM can provide, and determine whether or not it can be an asset that helps you adapt and evolve your mobile app experience to maintain your brand reputation and retain loyal customers.

October 1, 2014
Part Dev, Part Ops

July 7, 2014
AppDynamics announces AppSphere 2014
AppDynamics, the application intelligence leader for software-defined businesses has announced its first every user conference, AppSphere 2014. The conference will take place November 3-5 at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Featuring speakers from companies like Google, Lithium, and Microsoft, and a keynote by Bill Platt, GM of Amazon Web Services, AppSphere will be a thought-provoking symposium into how technology and applications are transforming today’s business world and beyond.

To learn more about the conference and register, visit: appdynamics.com/conference.

According to AppDynamics, AppSphere attendees will:
- ENGAGE with speakers and sponsors who are discussing the most up-to-date information and trends that are affecting technology now and in the future
- CONNECT with other attendees struggling to solve the same problems and discuss best practices
- DISCOVER how to increase efficiency, decrease time to value, and maximize ROI through tactics learned in breakouts and workshops
- DEEPEN your proficiency of AppDynamics through technical training and product roadmaps
Who should attend?

AppSphere attendees include application and operations decision makers, architects, engineers, business execs, and other industry heavyweights.

What Topics Will Be Covered?

The theme of AppSphere is “Transform,” and the agenda will discuss transformation across three tracks: Culture, Technology, and Business. Keep an eye on the agenda as they will be filling in keynote and breakout speakers as they’re confirmed.

To view the full program and secure your spot, please visit:appdynamics.com/conference
May 14, 2014
Mobile Apps and Big Data Megatrends Drive Application Performance Management

As the megatrends of Big Data, mobility and cloud continue to reshape the IT landscape many companies are responding by refocusing their solutions to provide better visibility and support for these technologies. Case in point is AppDynamics new Spring 2014 release announced yesterday (full disclosure, AppDynamics is a sponsor on devopsy.kinsta.cloud but that sponsorship has nothing to do with editorial content, just banners).

I had a chance to catch up with Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics yesterday. Jyoti made it very plain that mobile applications are quickly tipping the bar in terms of what types of applications his customers are asking for support on. That along with enhanced NoSQL support and support of some for some of the hottest languages being used in development today (Node.js and Scala) lead the way in his company’s latest release.

Gartner has weighed in on the increasing importance of monitoring mobile app performance. Jonah Kowall, research vice president at Gartner, in a recent report states, “driven by the increasing significance of mobile application endpoints and increasingly dynamic Web technologies, end-user-experience monitoring will become even more important to enterprises. In fact, it is likely to shift its center of gravity from monitoring the end-user experience of individual applications to monitoring and analyzing end-user behaviors across the entire portfolio of applications available to an end-user at any given endpoint.”

Personally I don’t think any of us need Gartner to tell us that there is an app for just about anything and many of them are mobile. Mobility is changing the way so many of us work. Mobile apps are poised to overtake web browsing sometime this year says Jyoti.

If anything is bigger than mobile though it may be Big Data. It seems that Big Data is everywhere. I saw an interesting stat the other day, something along the lines of 90% of all the data stored in the world is less than two years old. I guess that explains why we didn’t hear as much about Big Data before that. In any event there is big money being poured into Big Data solutions. Evidence of this is Intel’s Cloudera investment, $740m for 18% of the company. Cloudera is a Hadoop distributor of course and part of the AppDynamics new Big Data support is for enhanced Hadoop features.

NoSQL companies have also been a big beneficiary of the Big Data megatrend and VC investment of course. One of the biggest beneficiaries is MongoDB (again in full disclosure, devopsy.kinsta.cloud is a media sponsor of MongoDB World). Matt Asay who has written here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud and is also the VP of Marketing and Business Development had this to say about AppDynamics new NoSQL support. “Together with AppDynamics and MongoDB, organizations can now leverage application performance management solutions to gain further insight into their MongoDB-based applications. This partnership allows users end-to-end visibility for optimal performance in production, an important feature for companies as they scale their MongoDB deployments.”

To be accurate all of these new features in the Spring 2014 release of AppDynamics have actually been available already for at least a few weeks or months. In my conversation with Bansal I asked him that if he didn’t see a little irony in the fact that a DevOps enabler like AppDynamics still did somewhat traditional software releases instead of some sort of continuous delivery. Bansal said that these once a quarter releases are really just packaging up features that are released in a continuous fashion over the preceding quarter. These quarterly releases serve as a checkpoint, version control if you will. In actuality though AppDynamic customers have been getting this functionality as it comes out.

Application Performance Management seems to be a very hot area. In large part because of the mega trends of Big Data, mobility and cloud. It remains to be seen if these solutions will become part of (by acquisition or partnership) the bigger Application Development Lifecycle Management (ALM) market.

April 3, 2014
DevOps Dirty Little Secrets

By all outward appearances DevOps is gaining real velocity within IT shops worldwide, Duh tell you something you don’t know. I have read much on this topic as I am sure you have, but I never seem to read much with hard data results, other than we are doing great with some very broad metrics. What are the hard numbers as compared to the legacy IT shop? So my search begins; where in the world are devops metrics in Fortune 500/Enterprise organizations?

What got me thinking about this were a couple of recent AppDynamics blogs “Measuring your devops success” and “Quantifying the value of devops”. Both blogs do an excellent job at breaking down DevOps to the implementation level. Hard data creates metrics that set a baseline with the legacy system that is the critical measurement component, without a baseline there is nothing to compare or measure against. This approach creates a meaningful way to measure the success of executing a DevOps strategy within an IT shop. The blogs also point other factors not quite as easy to measure, particularly human elements. Many others have written on measuring DevOps, you need to adopt the approach that makes sense for you and your organization.

At that point I figured it was time to visit Puppet Labs, when you think DevOps Puppet Labs and their survey’s comes to mind. I utilized the 2013 State of DevOps Report; the 2014 report is not available yet. I believe that in order for any new philosophy to be adopted as a true standardized practice, the C-level in Fortune 500 organizations need to embrace it. In my long experience, typically the first sign of acceptance in traditional Fortune 500 organizations is when the financial vertical embraces it. As an example, Wall Street traders will pay good money to save two milliseconds on a trade.

The Puppet Labs report numbers demonstrate real velocity in the adoption of DevOps as an accepted business practice. The first takeaways I had from the report were that organizations ship code 30x times faster with 50% fewer failures. The numbers paint a glowing picture for DevOps. But looking beyond the glowing numbers, I see something else. DevOps is at a critical fork in the road and needs to cross the chasm before it loses its luster and becomes just another application development tool, as opposed to a practice.

Only 17% of the respondents were Managers or C-level, with only 22% of respondent companies having 10,000 employees or more. It is essential to look at individual Fortune 500 companies IT shops and measure them with hard data before and after the implementation of DevOps. I would love to read some in depth case studies of the Fortune 500 with hard numbers and metrics; I did not find anything with the legacy baseline data. A huge benefit of DevOps to the Fortune 500 is it will enable them to fail fast as opposed to continuing an implementation that will inevitably fail anyway and consume a huge amount resource in the process. Anyone who has worked for a Fortune company I am sure has witnessed this.

In truly understanding what DevOps is and is not, certain questions need real answers; Are Enterprise/Fortune 500 companies really doing the same old thing and just need to write better code utilizing some new application development tools, does that make it DevOps or just continuous improvement? Will some IT execs change the organizations title from sysadmin to Devops Admin to protect their silo and make them seem kinder gentler Ops? Are the DevOps tools available today ready for prime time in the Fortune 500 IT environment? Is Devops about technology and metrics or really about culture? We can speculate, but time will tell us the real answers. I am looking for good metrics on what does DevOps do to a Fortune 500 company Not some so called Unicorn that was born with a DevOps spoon in its mouth, but a good old fashioned Wall Street firm who adopts DevOps. Until then call me the DevOps skeptic.

If you would like say something; email parker@devops.com and don’t forget to comment here.

March 25, 2014