Esteemed analyst firm, Gartner, conducts an annual research report to compliment their popular Magic Quadrants. While the Magic Quadrants focus on plotting vendors, not products, in any given industry along x- and y-axis based on their vision and execution. The idea of the Magic Quadrant is to understand the vendor and the strategy of the vendor in a specific market. As of 2014 Gartner required a companion document with each Magic Quadrant be published. This companion document is the Critical Capabilities. The intention of this document is to rank products (vendor solutions) for specific use cases and capabilities for those use cases.
For application performance monitoring (APM), Gartner identified application support as a use case for APM solutions.
For Application Support teams who usually have to manage a wide range of tasks from triage support and root cause analysis to developing scripting and other code to hold application infrastructure together, the use cases for this team include detection, isolation, and remediation is critical. Gartner specifically called out are Business Analysis, Service Monitoring, Anomaly Detection, Distributed Profiling, Application Debugging, Workload Planning.
How AppDynamics supports Application Support teams
Application support is a critical buyer persona, which is usually comprised of a team of subject matter experts with deep knowledge of the application, and lighter knowledge of the infrastructure. These teams handle a wide range of tasks, from assisting with triage and root cause analysis to developing scripting and other code that holds the application and infrastructure together. Due to application support’s need for APM, the focus on problem detection, isolation and remediation is critical. In addition, EUEM is one of the best early-warning indicators that there’s an issue, which could be outside the application hosting environment, such as third-party services, including social media, network providers and payment processors. Mobile APM is increasingly important, because much of the user traffic is moving to native mobile applications. Code-level visibility can also help triage issues and hand them off to developers.
AppDynamics was built to support modern applications, which means providing the flexible, wide-ranged support required to maintain the performance of those applications.
Extensibility
The AppDynamics platform is open, extensible, and interoperable to fit any business need. The AppDynamics Exchange comes together to contribute knowledge through over 100 extensions that provide deep integrations into existing tools like Splunk, Apica, PagerDuty, and Amazon Web Services. From monitoring Amazon Web Services costs to MEAS mainframes, AppDynamics extensions allow you to leverage the tools you already have in place.
AppDynamics enables application support on its Application Intelligence Platform through multiple extension capabilities:
- Monitoring Extensions: Integrating metrics from other monitoring systems and services including databases, LDAP servers, web servers and more.
- Alerting Extensions: Creating custom notifications to integrate AppDynamics health rule violations and events with your alerting or ticketing system.
- Big Data Extensions: Capturing and integrating metrics from servers with specific Big Data sources installed.
- Cloud Connector Extensions: Integrating cloud orchestration and elasticity functionality such as creating, destroying, restarting, configuring, and validating machine and image instances.
- Performance Testing Extensions: Combining the power of AppDynamics with your existing performance testing tools.
- REST API Extensions: Retrieving data from your AppDynamics system, including application and infrastructure metadata, metrics, events, and transaction snapshots.
Real-User Monitoring
AppDynamics supports Application Support teams with the capability of monitoring and optimizing both your browser and mobile applications to ensure an ideal user experience with every user journey.
Using browser real-user monitoring (RUM) follow their journey and optimize their experience with powerful end-to-end performance management that rapidly identifies application issues and relevant business transactions, and dramatically reduces Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). Browser RUM enables Application Support teams to understand ever end-user experience on a global scale, in real time. It’s able to quickly examine and resolve bottlenecks with end-to-end visibility and gain accurate user insights to optimize web user experiences.
Application Support teams gain the ability to drill down into individual user experience to respond quickly and resolve web application performance issues. Through the AppDynamics platform, they are also able to set up alerts to dynamically baseline website metrics.
In addition to Browser Real-User Monitoring, AppDynamics provides the capability of optimizing your native mobile application’s end user experience through Mobile Real-User Monitoring. As most of a consumer’s needs are met through devices rather than desktop, mobile APM is becoming critical to provide an ideal experience for end users. Mobile RUM allows Application Support teams to track an end user’s journey and optimize their experience with powerful end-to-end performance management that rapidly identifies application issues and relevant business transactions — from device to data center — and dramatically reduces MTTR at the same time.
Mobile RUM enables you to track mobile user sessions in real-time and understand the business impact of mobile app performance on your KPIs. It gains deep, code-level visibility to identify and resolve crashes, and retrieves detailed visibility into all your network requests right from your mobile app, allowing Application Support teams to pass on critical information more efficiently, without interrupting service.
Summary
With a modern, holistic application performance management solution, Application Support teams are able to gain and apply insight, actionable data, and visibility that will support their entire application infrastructure. To see how Gartner analyzed APM vendors and their support for Application Support teams, read the full complimentary report.
