Research firm, Gartner, conducts two important research projects yearly in the application performance monitoring space. The first is the well known Magic Quadrant. The Magic Quadrant compares the vision and execution of vendors in a specific market. In 2014, Gartner also began requiring a second research report with each Magic Quadrant called a Critical Capabilities Report. This report ranks products, or vendor solutions capabilities for specific use cases.
For application performance monitoring (APM), Gartner identified DevOps release as a persona. For Agile DevOps teams who often have a rapid release cycle, diagnosing and resolving application issues, while gaining code-level visibility are among the requirements. To address these needs, common APM solutions provide features such as anomaly detection, distributed profiling, workload planning, and much more.
How AppDynamics supports DevOps teams
AppDynamics was built to support modern-day infrastructure. That means having the capabilities to be flexible and scalable for Agile releases and the holistic view to support both Dev and Ops.
Continuous delivery
One tenant of DevOps is to release new software in rapid, quick delivery timelines. By closely aligning development, testing, and operations, these DevOps teams can ship product faster.
AppDynamics provides a “compare application releases” capability to help DevOps teams plan and validate releases.
Agile organizations with rapid release cycles often encounter tremendous challenges managing application performance in the face of a continually changing environment. AppDynamics enables IT teams to immediately correlate the impact of an agile release upon application performance, providing visual cues of significant events. This “before and after” view offers tremendous peace-of-mind for application teams that constantly release new code into their production environment and ensures that the application performance is trending (from a quality and effectiveness perspective) in the right direction from release to release.
Virtual War Room
In AppDynamics 4.0, we launched our Virtual War Room feature. With any major outage, a war room scenario is inevitable — where business leaders, database admins, developers, IT leaders, and more huddle together to figure out what went wrong and how can they fix it.
With the Virtual War Room, all these various stakeholders can collaborate in real time as they analyze data, performance metrics, and ultimately resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Plan release and change processes
DevOps is built (and reliant) on maintaining a constant feedback loop between two typically separate teams. Having the ability to gain end-to-end visibility of your entire application environment and third-party dependencies along with gaining real-time data is incredibly helpful to support your application lifecycle.
Quantify the value of your DevOps team by ensuring frequent application change and releases processes bring actual business benefits. By understanding your user behavior and their interactions with your application, teams can better plan their release cycles and feature roll-outs.
Summary
Using a modern APM solution, DevOps teams are able to gain insight, actionable data, and visibility that will support their entire application lifecycle. The need to innovate quickly and maintain quality releases has never been more paramount, so make sure you check out the right feature sets to support your use cases.
To see how Gartner analyzed APM vendors and their support for DevOps teams, read the full complimentary report.