News

Java/.NET APM Provider AppDynamics Adds End-User Monitoring

• By John K. Waters
• March 13, 2012

Java/.NET Application Performance Management (APM) company AppDynamics has just added end-user monitoring (EUM) to the commercial edition of its namesake APM solution. The EUM capabilities now available in AppDynamics Pro measure browser rendering times and network latency.

EUM captures end-to-end performance metrics for such business transactions as page rendering time in the browser, network time, and processing time in the app infrastructure, according to the company. It also identifies bottlenecks in the transaction flow, and compares performance across all browsers types, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and the Android browser.

EUM is a core capability in the evolving APM world, a segment which was identified in 2010 by Gartner. In a report published that year, Gartner analysts outline three "dimensions" of APM: 1) user-defined transaction profiling; 2) application component deep-dive monitoring; and 3) application component discovery and modeling.

In his "Cool Vendors in IT Operations Management, 2010" report, Gartner analyst Will Cappelli wrote: "Using technologies supporting the first dimension, one can quickly determine the space/time coordinates of an application performance problem's source. Using the second dimension, one can look deeply into that source and diagnose the problem that is actually occurring."

In an earlier report, Cappelli underscored the evolving focus of APM. "By year-end 2014, the majority of APM vendors will offer runtime application discovery modeling tools that combine IT service dependency mapping, user-defined transaction profiling, and business process modeling functionalities," he wrote.

Earlier this year, Gartner research director Jonah Kowall wrote in his blog: "There is immense value in understanding the end-user experience (EUM) of your users as they access applications. What was once done with simple synthetic or robotic monitoring has graduated to understand the user fully, not just from a network perspective, but also from a device or access point perspective."

"Most IT organizations are still implementing EUM," he added, "and many that have had EUM tools have started to think and implement tools to cover some of the other dimensions of APM."

AppDynamics points to a "generational shift" from monolithic to distributed applications as the primary driver of the APM market, as well as "architectural trends," like cloud computing, SOA, Big Data and Agile software development. According to the company, AppDynamics has attracted more than 70,000 users of its free Java performance monitoring product, AppDynamics Lite, which it targeted to IT operations troubleshooting app performance problems on Tomcat, JBoss, Weblogic, Websphere and Glassfish.

Current and new AppDynamics customers get free access to the new end-user monitoring capabilities as part of their AppDynamics Pro license. More information is available on the company's Web site.