Business iQ Correlates Business Metrics With Application Performance

Business iQ combines business and application performance into a single, real-time view.

With the launch of Business iQ at AppSphere 2016, many customers have asked us about the new business-focused dashboards they saw in our on-stage demo. Our customers want to understand how AppDynamics can help them achieve real-time business monitoring.

Before diving into our dashboards, it’s important to understand why we built these visualizations. The challenges of digital transformation have forced us to create better tools to help us achieve increased business velocity and reduced Mean Time to Business Awareness (MTBA). How did our last release affect conversion rates? When will we know if business outcomes have changed?

We can no longer rely on dashboards that update once or twice per day or even once or twice per hour. For critical software applications, reducing MTBA means knowing a problem exists within one or two minutes.

The True Real-Time Executive Dashboard

Figure 1: Sample executive dashboard we built for our on-stage demo of Business iQ.

For existing customers, seeing total sales, average order value, and cart yield on an AppDynamics dashboard evokes feelings of excitement and possibility. IT teams can now take the first step towards providing lines of business owners real-time perspective of business performance that hasn’t been possible with traditional log management and analytics tools.

All of the health lights seen in Figure 1 are powered by metrics which can be baselined the same way we baseline application performance. All of this data is fed into Signal iQ, which is our massive big data machine learning platform. This means customers can now slice and dice their data however they like and create health rules and alerts when something goes awry.

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Conversion Impact Dashboard

Customer conversion funnels are standard fare for e-commerce companies, but AppDynamics has pushed the envelope with our new sample Conversion Impact Dashboard. As of fall 2016, we’re now able to pull in browser and mobile session data directly into analytics and show how a slowed payment transaction could affect the number of orders going through the system.

We’ve revamped and improved our analytics funnel widget to include additional information which shows the drop-off between each funnel stage.

Figure 2: Sample conversion funnel with business and application performance health lights.

For many of our attendees, seeing this dashboard was the aha moment they’ve been waiting for. Businesses are now able to correlate business metrics with application performance. In Figure 2, we can see business performance on the left, which utilizes multiple baselines to monitor the health of each stage of the user journey. On the right, we have baselines monitoring the performance of our key business transactions.

If application performance causes a decrease in business performance, we can fire notifications via email, SMS, Slack, or any other third-party service. This is how we begin reducing MTBA.

United Airlines Leads the Way

At AppSphere 2016, we invited Bill Hineline, United’s Director of APM and IT on stage to discuss how his team utilizes Business iQ to achieve increased velocity and business results for both external and internal customers.

“We understand where the business impact is, and it allows us to make better decisions.” — Bill Hineline

United is one of the largest airlines in the world and their day-to-day operation is dependent upon numerous business-critical applications that handle ticketing, check-in, luggage tracking, flight schedules, and more.

United has invested deeply in Business iQ and now uses AppDynamics to correlate user metrics with application performance. Mr. Hineline’s team can now release software with confidence. Any issues from a new version will be alerted to them within minutes.