News

AppDynamics, Apica Partner for DevOps App Performance Testing

• By David Ramel
• August 30, 2017

AppDynamics and Apica have teamed up to deliver an enterprise-focused, integrated load testing and application performance monitoring solution.

The pact sees Apica -- specializing in testing for Web, streaming, mobile and APIs -- integrating its Apica LoadTest tool with the application performance management platform from AppDynamics.

The companies positioned their joint effort as a way to address DevOps problems associated with the wide variety of tools used by application development and operations teams. AppDynamics said in a blog post today that usage of such disparate tools can lead to a disjointed workflow and uncorrelated data that can hinder addressing app issues prior to release.

"The integration with AppDynamics allows developers and performance engineering teams to generate test scripts and production level loads using Apica, and seamlessly visualize and trace issues in their applications arising from load testing down to the code level utilizing AppDynamics," said Kevin Wagner at AppDynamics.

He said the solution will enable developers to proactively find and address performance issues in the development lifecycle while also providing the ability to refine platform sizing estimations.

In practice the Apica LoadTest/AppDynamics integration will see the Apica LoadTest Portal generate production-level loads on a target system, after which AppDynamics will generate a list of business transactions and associated metrics used in the test. This list, when used with transaction snapshots created during the test, will help DevOps teams identify issues that need fixing, aided by seamless navigation and data sharing between the two systems.

Wagner fleshed out those details in his post.

"The Apica LoadTest integration with AppDynamics correlates the generated load with relevant business transactions captured in AppDynamics," he said. "As a test executes business transactions, AppDynamics follows them down to method level visibility. AppDynamics provides a complete list of all business transactions and metrics from the end user experience, code, and associated infrastructure including Docker and public/private cloud providers.

"Additionally, AppDynamics metrics for business transactions, infrastructure and end user experience are available in the Apica Portal and can be used as custom graphs to highlight performance of a specific transaction or test."