AppDynamics Extends Monitoring Ambitions

AppDynamics, a unit of Cisco, unveiled a slew of offerings today that extend the reach and scope of the company’s monitoring capabilities delivered via the cloud. Those enhancements will be shown for the first time this week at an AppD event.

An update to the company’s Business iQ service will add the ability to start tracking groups of transactions and events within a single AppDynamics Business Journey process. AppDynamics is also adding an Experience Level Management (ELM) capability through which IT organizations can now monitor thresholds by customer, location or device.

AppDynamics will also now extend the reach of its monitoring service out to the network level as well as devices that connect to an Internet of Things (IoT) application by making available additional agent software.

Finally, AppDynamics announced it is extending the machine learning algorithms infused in the monitoring service to add KPI Analyzer, an analytics application through which organizations can more proactively track key performance indicators (KPIs).

Prathap Dendi, general manager of Business iQ at AppDynamics, says AppDynamics is making a concerted effort to reduce the number of disparate tools an organization needs to manage a modern IT environment. As part of that effort, Dendi says that the days when IT teams gathered in war rooms to figure out what might be wrong with any given application are now coming to an end. At the same time, however, Dendi says it’s important that all the events being tracked by IT correlate with specific transactions involving customers.

“Everything needs to be able to bubble up to the business level,” says Dendi.

Dendi says that almost by definition, organizations need to be able to extend modern DevOps processes to include business analysts and line of business executives that depend on IT to manage the business.

There’s an old saying that things measured are things done. Alas, not every IT organization is measuring everything in a way that the business can appreciate or even comprehend. One way to improve that relationship is to start surfacing reports that are focused on customers rather than, say, the availability of an IT system. Not every IT organization is perfectly aligned with the business as they should be. But arguably, one of the first places to get started improving that alignment is to start measuring the things the business really cares about.