Published on the 15/07/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
AppDynamics, which monitors applications performance, is updating the platform so that it can be deployed in Amazon’s cloud, potentially also in Australia…
Eighteen months after its official launch in Australia, AppDynamics now claims 75 companies use its technology locally. Most today have on premise deployments. The current software as a service version of the tool is served out of AppDynamics’ data centres in the US, but the company is presently re-engineering the system so that it can run on Amazon’s cloud.
Jonah Kowall, vice president of market development and insights, who was in Australia this week said that while the US and Europe were likely to be the first markets where this solution was deployed, if there was enough user demand other markets would also be offered the option, including potentially Australia.
At present about 50 percent of the company’s local customers use an on premise deployment compared to a cloud version of the service. Internationally the split has settled at 60 percent local deployment, 40 percent cloud, said Kowall.
Local users include retailers, two of Australia’s leading banks, a handful of smaller financial institutions and technology companies.
Kowall joined the company earlier this year, from Gartner, where he last year positioned AppDynamics in the analyst’s leaders’ quadrant for application performance monitoring.
AppDynamics provides unified monitoring of applications – particularly consumer facing applications, supports DevOps collaboration and underpins application analytics. The tool can be used to create an enterprise dashboard that shows where there are bottlenecks or systems problems.
That insight can be used to remedy technical issues, and to placate the inconvenienced consumer – for example triggering a discount coupon if the customer experienced an applications outage or go-slow.
The tool is however currently limited to monitoring the performance of relatively modern applications. It can’t for example monitor the performance of a mainframe legacy system – though Kowall said it was working on that. Nor can it monitor a third party SaaS application, which Kowall acknowledged could currently only be monitored “synthetically”.
He said that achieving independent SaaS monitoring would require enterprise users to demand that their SaaS vendors make APIs available to performance monitoring systems, acknowledging it was unlikely that SaaS vendors would of their own volition expose themselves to that level of scrutiny.
Kowall said that a number of SaaS vendors already used AppDynamics’ technology to monitor performance but never made the resulting insights public.
Despite these limitations AppDynamics’ technology has been deployed by 1,940 users internationally.
Traditionally marketed as a tool to help enterprises monitor the increasingly diverse range of applications used by consumers, Kowall explained this was the foundation for the business process monitoring that AppDynamics ultimately wanted to be known for.
