AppDynamics Exposes Apps Analytics Data via API

Automating the Intelligence of Business Intelligence

As organizations of all sizes rely more on IT to drive any number of critical business processes, visibility into not only their applications but also the business processes that rely on them has become crucial. To provide that visibility, AppDynamics is looking to turn the data it collects (via the analytics application it makes available as a service) into a resource that other applications and management tools can invoke through an application programming interface (API).

The AppDynamics Application Analytics service is designed to correlate application performance against specific business metrics. In addition to providing access to an API, the latest update exposes more types of data, including log data as well as all the data in the company’s namesake application performance monitoring service.

Other enhancements include a custom SQL-based query language that enables unified search and log correlation against specific business transactions, data widgets and other user interface enhancements, and support for role-based access control.

At the same time, AppDynamics, with the Winter 2014 release of its core AppDynamics Intelligence Platform for monitoring applications, adds support for detailed user sessions support, expanded monitoring of server infrastructure, the ability to also monitor C/C++ applications and 25 new extensions, including 19 for monitoring Amazon Web Services (AWS) components.

Kalyan Ramanathan, vice president of product marketing for AppDynamics, says that, for all the hype surrounding digital business transformation, most organizations are not going to make any real progress until they can monitor specific business transactions as they occur across mobile, Web and cloud application environments. Today, Ramanathan says, rather than relying on a unified approach to monitoring a specific business process, most organizations waste time trying to correlate data across two or more monitoring systems in the hope they might be able to discern an issue that is adversely affecting a business process that almost by definition is going to span multiple types of applications.

The open API added to AppDynamics Analytics Application now makes it easier to apply all those correlations across a complex set of applications to optimize a digital business, adds Ramanathan.

There’s no doubt that interest in all things digital business is running high these days. But before most organizations can really hope to transform themselves into a digital business, they will clearly need more visibility into the applications that actually drive the digital business. Unfortunately, most of the existing tools that IT organizations rely on today do more to obfuscate what is actually occurring inside a digital business than they do to illuminate it.