Even from a business perspective, application performance management (APM) has become a critical tool in turning business, user, and performance data into relevant insights. Application owners, line-of-business (LOB) managers, and service delivery stakeholders are all investing in APM tools to gain business metrics. In the past, application owners were provided infrastructure metrics and health data from IT operations teams, but realizing that this information was not enough to make business decisions has enabled APM tools to be bought and driven by the LOB buyer, who has limited technical capabilities. In terms of what these users seek, there are major differences. The primary focus is on business metrics, but also end-user experience data, as SLAs may be in place.

In Gartner’s Critical Capabilities research report on APM, the research firm takes a deep dive into certain products in different industries and constructs the features that are of best use certain personas. We took a look into their emphasis on Application Development as one critical capability alongside DevOps, Application Support, IT Ops teams, and Application Development for application performance monitoring suites.

If you haven’t read the full report on the critical capabilities of APM, download a copy of the report right here.

How AppDynamics Supports the Application Owner

Unified Analytics

AppDynamics provides a unique capability with application analytics. Unified Analytics bridges the gap between application performance, users and business outcomes in real time. Application owners and LOB managers are able to utilize auto-correlated and integrated data in order to better understand a customer’s experiences and lead the way to optimize business results. With the next generation of Unified Analytics solution, application owners can quickly answer more meaningful questions than ever before, all in real-time, and gain insight into how, when and where end users use applications and engage with their business. The unified analytics solution allows them to quickly query customer usage information to enhance persona knowledge and leverage the data to drive customer enablement and prioritize product development efforts

Within AppDynamics’ extensive analytics solution, application owners have access to customizable dashboards that rapidly analyze and visualize large data sets. They can leverage pre-built widgets or build their own charts with the ability to analyze multiple fields in x- and y-axis and quickly build interactive custom analytics dashboards to get insights, monitor trends, and influence business outcomes. Integrated reporting capabilities make it fast and easy to share insights with team members and senior management, and easily enforced privacy and access control through role-based access control features available with each module maintain security on a micro-level. 

A key factor of visibility is being able to visualize your entire back-end environment, as transactions occur. Application owners must be able to have that visibility at all times, in order to proactively optimize their application’s performance. AppDynamics also implements a dynamic flowmap of your application and infrastructure along with third-party extensions. Any performance issue is intuitively flagged by a corresponding node and indicate it for the user. AppDynamics delivers standard key metrics through an intuitive dashboard, along with features to allow you to create your own customized dashboards so cross-functional teams can see the metrics that matter to them.

Understanding performance in real time is essential to ensure that applications are meeting customers performance expectations. Along with having the ability to quickly create dashboards that show the performance of key business transactions, application owners can also correlate customer demand with application capacity to make sure that applications continue to perform during peak periods of usage in order to optimize application performance. AppDynamics allows you to delve deeper with insights into your machine data from multiple sources, and visualize and analyze logs to get forensic insights. Users also have the ability to set up metrics alerts to proactively manage user experience. Application owners can pinpoint errors, dig deeper into the root cause of issues, and gain complete visibility into infrastructure issues that go beyond code fixes. 

Summary

Application owners need to be able to have the insight to gain real-time information of how their customers are using mobile and web applications while understanding how their applications drive revenue and create brand loyalty. With features like Unified Analytics, customizable dashboards, and alerting, AppDynamics creates a flexible environment for cross-functional teams, like application or line of business stakeholders to utilize the data most important to them. 

Interested in reading the full Gartner report? Click here for your complimentary copy.