With the the rise in SaaS-based products and mobile applications, application development teams are becoming a critical stakeholder in application performance. Real-time visibility is critical into seeing how applications work in test, pre-production and production environments to ensure that your code delivers the performance and functionality that your end users expect. Without the right monitoring solution, application performance takes additional resources and time that may not lead you to the most efficient solution. That’s why Gartner identifies Application Development as a vital use case for application performance monitoring (APM) tools.
Application development also means consistent testing throughout an application lifecycle. When faced with the buying decision, application developers need to focus on code-level visibility, including the ability to compare different environments. There is also a need to understand the importance of multi-channel applications, and how they impact a developer’s insight into visibility and application performance.
In Gartner’s latest Critical Capabilities research report on APM, the research firm takes a deep dive into certain products in different industries and constructs the features that are of best use certain personas. We took a look into their emphasis on Application Development as one critical capability alongside DevOps, Application Support, IT Ops teams, and Application Owners for application performance monitoring suites.
To read the full report on the critical capabilities of APM, download a copy of the report right here.
How AppDynamics supports Application Development
End-to-end performance visibility
A rise in innovation, infrastructure technology, and market development has created a more complex application architecture than ever before. That complexity requires a more in-depth visibility into application framework to constantly monitor, test, and troubleshoot to maintain a seamless performance and ideal user experience.
With AppDynamics’ Unified Monitoring, Application Development teams have an easy to deploy solution that ensures applications perform exactly as expected in various environments (test, pre-production, and production). Immediately identify the root cause of any application performance issue and get down to the code in three clicks. Unified Monitoring also comes with a specific development monitoring mode to remove bugs and tune performance before the application even goes live.
Additionally, AppDynamics supports application developers by optimizing an end-user’s experience of mobile apps in real-time, with end-to-end performance monitoring. With automatic detection of mobile app crashes, application developers gain code-level insight to resolve those crashes more efficiently than before, and without impacting a user’s experience. Developers can also understand a mobile application usage patterns, and gain detailed visibility into usage across devices, networks, operating systems, and more, all in real-time in optimize future development.
A key factor of visibility is being able to visualize your entire back-end environment, as transactions occur. AppDynamics implements a dynamic flowmap of your application and infrastructure along with third-party extensions. Any performance issue is intuitively flagged by a corresponding node and indicate it for the user.
We also know how important it is to monitor and collaborate based on your application health to your internal network. AppDynamics can deliver standard key metrics via its intuitive dashboard, along with features to allow you to create your own customized dashboards so cross-functional teams can see the metrics that matter to them.
Ensuring application performance with Business Transactions
Application developers are constantly working on the next release to drive a stellar experience to their end users. However, those releases require more than just updates to ensure they will perform in the app store.
AppDynamics allows development teams to easily compare releases to ensure that applications perform in production as you intended them to perform. They own the ability to compare applications to learn about how changes and new releases will impact response times and overall performance. Understand how each new release impacts the value provided to the user and your business by comparing Business Transaction performance. Business Transactions are the aggregate of all the required software functions and components called upon to deliver an application response to a device or user initiated request. They allow users to automatically discover and tag a business transaction’s performance with tagging. That visualization prioritizes the end-to-end business transactions performance, not just the health of the application and infrastructure nodes.
While you’re able to track performance issues through benchmarking in production environments, it’s also critical to be able to capture potential issues in pre-production usage as well. The key to that is being proactive, and avoiding performance issues before going live in production. AppDynamics integrates with load testing processes and technologies, like LoadRunner, to gain deep application-level visibility to answer why a problem occurs, rapidly pinpoint bottlenecks in their environment, and compare results across releases and performance tests It also improves performance by measuring the end-to-end performance from the end-user perspective and increases scalability of the application by optimizing software and avoiding unnecessary hardware investments.
Cross-functional collaboration to resolve application performance issues
In a software-defined business, application performance becomes everyone’s responsibility. Application development teams have the ability to build and utilize virtual, real-time war rooms that allow cross-function teams to troubleshoot issues proactively before long lasting business impact. Teams can then easily compare and correlate different metrics to understand the root cause of performance issues.
Summary
Application development teams need to be able to build better web and mobile applications with deep performance visibility in test, pre-production and production environments. With features like Unified Monitoring, Business Transactions, and virtual war room support, AppDynamics provides some of the key capabilities needed to succeed in application performance.
Want to learn the latest insights and best practices around the Gartner Critical Capabilities report? The analyst and author of the report, Will Capelli, will be hosting a free webinar on August 11th to go over the current market, the future of APM, and key trends. Reserve your seat before it’s too late!
Interested in reading the full Gartner report? Click here for your complimentary copy.
