Build and support better applications with Application Intelligence Industry Perspective
Getting BetterResults With Federal with DevOps and Cloud Initiatives Build & Support Better Applications Application Intelligence
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Executive summary Federal agencies are increasingly reliant on software applications to meet their varied missions. But as their IT environments become more complex with the advent of cloud services, virtualization and mobile devices, the challenge of managing and optimizing application performance is likewise more complex. This challenge is aggravated by the fact that agencies typically employ monitoring tools designed to assess the performance of individual silos within the IT infrastructure — such as the databases, networks, servers, browsers and operating systems — not the performance of an individual application as it runs through those silos. The result is that agencies are often left with fragmented and limited capability to ensure optimal application performance. As applications increasingly operate in more dynamic and complex environments — such as private, hybrid or commercial clouds — it is vital that agencies gain greater understanding of their applications’ health from the perspective of the end user. The way to do this is to see at a very deep level how each end-user interaction with an application is performing, from the end user’s device to every node of the IT infrastructure it touches along the way to the database and back. This deep-level visibility into the end-to-end journey of a single application transaction is known as application intelligence, and it offers a more powerful approach to delivering optimized application performance.
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For this Industry Perspective, GovLoop sat down with Josh Beard, Director of Federal Sales at AppDynamics, to better understand what application intelligence is and the value it delivers to federal agencies. In a nutshell, application intelligence refers to deep visibility into an application’s health and performance and, ultimately, the ability to apply insights gained from that visibility toward improved mission performance. With application intelligence:
• DevOps teams are better integrated and more aware of weaknesses in their code or IT environment. • Digital services are developed and launched faster and with greater confidence. • Root causes of performance problems are discovered and fixed far faster. • Cloud environments are better understood and can be more accurately calibrated to ensure optimal application performance. Likewise, applications can be quickly diagnosed and fine-tuned to take better advantage of their cloud environments. • Far less time and resources are spent responding to application performance problems or to data calls seeking information on an application.
Industry Perspective Getting Better Results With Federal DevOps and Cloud Initiatives
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The need for Application Intelligence Federal agencies have no shortage of tools when it comes to monitoring their IT infrastructures. Data centers are typically peppered with technologies that log the activities of databases, servers, websites, networks and other IT silos. But these fragmented monitoring capabilities do not equal visibility — especially at the application layer, which crosses all dimensions of the IT environment. “Data centers and clouds are built to give feedback to the engineers who built them, right?” Beard said. “We get a lot of rich data and telemetry and instrumentation on the servers and switches, the storage, the network. But we leave it up to the individual apps and their teams to figure out how to get visibility into their application. This is the problem we solve at AppDynamics.” The result is that agencies have little insight into how their mission-critical applications are performing from start to finish for their end users, whether they are citizens relying on government services or information, contractors working on a critical government project or federal or military personnel in the field employing those apps to perform their missions. Consequently, federal program managers lack insight into why their applications may be underperforming or how they could be optimized to achieve better mission results.
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Deep visibility into an application is enabled by a class of technology solutions known as Application Performance Management (APM), which extract, collect and analyze a wide variety of software signals, events and metrics surrounding an application and its supporting IT infrastructure, providing keen insights for improving operational efficiencies and user experience. The ability to see — down to the code level, if necessary — every twist and turn that an application transaction makes along its node-to-node journey from the end user to the database and back is a powerful capability that addresses many federal use cases. Agencies can see quickly why an application is running slowly or producing errors; answer data calls about how an application is performing and supporting the broader mission and see exactly how an application is operating — enabling adjustments to optimize that performance — within the dynamic and highly scalable environments of the cloud. Ultimately, application intelligence offers the ability to develop and run applications in even the most demanding production environments that are more dependable and responsive to the end user.
We get a lot of rich data and telemetry and instrumentation on the servers and switches, the storage, the network. But we leave it up to the individual apps and their teams to figure out how to get visibility into their application. This is the problem we solve at AppDynamics.” – Josh Beard, Director of Federal Sales, AppDynamics
Build & Support Better Applications with Application Intelligence
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Improving the end user experience Application intelligence provides deep insight into the application’s end-user experience by answering the question: How are users actually using and experiencing the application? Application intelligence can tell a program manager exactly how, when and on which devices an application is being used; whether it is running as expected or abnormally; precisely how the application is interacting with the IT infrastructure supporting it and how the application code or the IT infrastructure can be adjusted so the application can perform better and more reliably. This is not the case with traditional data center monitoring tools in use at federal agencies. “While everything looks great in the data center, agencies have 24/7 help desks and there’s a lot a dissatisfaction with the user experience,” Beard said. “With application intelligence, we can now start to make the real user experience a part of the decision matrix and part of your cadence where you’re really not just putting the app out there and hoping, but you’re actually able to use data to show and understand how real users are experiencing it.” Application intelligence also can provide insights into how particular user populations are interacting with the application. This is helpful when, for instance, users with a particular mobile device or operating system or in a particular geographic region are experiencing common problems. Application intelligence can help to quickly spot problems and figure out root causes. This contrasts with the traditional approach at many federal agencies of trying to solve application problems by using anecdotal evidence and various IT infrastructure data to narrow down the root cause of a problem. “We can now have data-driven conversations. With this unique dataset available, we can make changes and generate results that have a meaningful impact on the user experience,” Beard said.
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In the end, Beard said, application intelligence offers federal agencies the ability to see, act and know. Specifically, that means: • Seeing the entire application in real time as it responds to individual end users and operates across the IT infrastructure. This often means being able to spot performance problems long before they prompt end-user complaints; • Acting quickly to fix problems or fine-tune an application — in development or production — based on data reflecting deep visibility into how the app is relating with its surrounding infrastructure; and • Knowing critical trends in the application over time, as well as its contribution to overall mission goals. AppDynamics has an industry-leading APM solution called the Application Intelligence Platform, which works in all phases of the application lifecycle — development, test and production — to provide deep-level visibility into the end-to-end journey of each and every application transaction. The platform uses this data to build and enrich feedback loops from those development, test and production environments back to the development and operations teams responsible for optimizing the application’s performance, ultimately ensuring a far more satisfying experience for the end user. The AppDynamics platform adopts a top-down approach to performance monitoring by focusing on the end user’s experience with the business transactions of the application. A Business Transaction is the aggregate of all the required software functions and components called upon to deliver an application response to a device or user initiated request. It traces the entire business transaction path, from the end-user device or browser, through the application code, databases, third-party API calls, servers and other infrastructure. This presents a far more accurate and direct way of understanding the health of cloud-based applications than traditional bottom-up approaches that rely on silo-based monitoring solutions to collect snapshots of data from various components and then infer the health of the application.
Industry Perspective
APPLICATION INTELLIGENCE USE CASE
Enhancing DevOps One of the biggest use cases for application intelligence is enhancing DevOps activities. Federal agencies are increasingly turning to DevOps application development approaches to spin up new digital services that are faster to production, less costly and lower-risk. DevOps works by bringing software engineering teams and IT operations teams together to collaboratively manage the application lifecycle. To do this, people, processes and technology are realigned to forge a continuous DevOps feedback loop between operations and development teams for developing, testing, deploying, monitoring and analyzing applications. Application intelligence assists this process by monitoring everything the application is doing throughout this lifecycle. DevOps teams can then use that rich application performance data to guide and prioritize subsequent fixes and improvements to the application. This is particularly helpful in cases where an agency’s DevOps organization also operates as an Agile organization by developing new digital services through a series of short spurts of activity known as sprints. Said Beard: “When you do a release sprint, you populate a backlog of activities [essentially, a “to-do” list of bug fixes, tweaks and capability add-ons] that will harden the application and make it ready to go in the
next release. Frequently, that’s anecdotal — ‘Hey, we tried this test, it didn’t work,’ or, ‘Steve said the login was slow.’ With application intelligence, we can now take your most important business transactions from your application and tell you, over the last test cycle or the last four weeks, what were the slowest components in those applications, the slowest jobs, the slowest SQL queries. And, all of a sudden, for DevOps teams, we can populate that backlog with the low-hanging fruit that, as they remediate these items, will directly improve the performance of that application.” In short, application intelligence enables DevOps teams to better visualize their applications from end to end, obtain data-rich feedback on their behavior during performance testing and deliver high-performing apps into production much faster. The AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform has many features designed specifically to help developers fine-tune their code, spot existing or potential problems and, when problems do surface, quickly pinpoint the responsible statements or calls. In supporting DevOps, the AppDynamics platform can be used to monitor all applications activities in depth; fine-tune alert and business transactions policies prior to production deployments; identify testing requirements and testing gaps and rapidly report on performance test results.
Application intelligence enables DevOps teams to:
Better visualize their applications from end-to-end
Obtain data-rich feedback on their performance
Deliver high-performing apps into production much faster
Build & Support Better Applications with Application Intelligence
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APPLICATION INTELLIGENCE USE CASE
Enhancing applications in the cloud Another major use case for application intelligence is optimizing application performance within private, hybrid or commercial cloud environments. The federal government’s transition to more modern, agile and responsive IT infrastructures through the Cloud First initiative is critical to achieving greater efficiencies and more robust service-delivery capabilities. But this effort comes with the challenge of ensuring that applications are optimized to leverage the power, scalability and efficiencies that modern cloud architectures offer. As federal agencies move more of their applications to cloud environments, which offers less control of the infrastructure, they can employ application intelligence to gain critical visibility into their application’s IT environment. This visibility is a powerful tool when migrating apps from the data center into the cloud, when refactoring — or modernizing — applications for the cloud, when developing new cloud-native apps and when monitoring cloud-hosted apps in production. Beard said the visibility that application intelligence provides into cloud environments helps agencies feel more comfortable because they can actually see how their applications are performing in real time. “When moving to the cloud, the biggest concern is loss of application visibility and control” Beard said. “So application intelligence can eliminate that concern and really drive cloud adoption by helping teams get comfortable with the fact that their application is running effectively and meeting end-user expectations in that environment. As an agency’s cloud adoption scales and matures, transitioning from Infrastructure-as-a-Service to Platform-as-a-Service, we really help drive that with self-service application intelligence.” The AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform is specifically designed to manage applications in these complex and dynamic environments: It can monitor several thousand cloud nodes to keep pace with even the most extreme production environments, and it
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presents the performance and flow data in an easy-tograsp, integrated way. And it tracks the entire application transaction in real time at extremely low overhead, consuming less than 2 percent of system resources in production. AppDynamics helps agencies minimize the risks of deploying to the cloud and, equally important, take full advantage of the many benefits associated with cloud deployments. Agencies use the solution to monitor, troubleshoot, diagnose and scale their production applications, gaining significantly greater visibility into their application’s performance and getting to root causes of performance problems dramatically faster when they occur. One unique feature of the AppDynamics platform is its ability to offer a rich, data-driven comparison of an application’s performance both before and after it is migrated from the data center to the cloud so IT teams know what differences exist in how end users are experiencing the app. “If my login for my application went from being half a second to being several seconds after this migration, then it’s really important for me to know that,” Beard said. “Because if I declare ‘mission accomplished’ and I don’t fix that, or even know that I need to, it’s not going to be a success.” That same visibility also helps agencies refactor their applications from being data center-native apps into being cloud-native apps. It can identify where hot spots are in the code or weaknesses in the software architecture that might interfere with the app taking full advantage of cloud-native features like elasticity. And it enables development teams to think more analytically about their applications as they refactor them for the cloud. “We’re starting to get some feedback where customers, as they refactor their applications for the cloud, want to know if they really need to rebuild this whole application, or do their end users only use 20 percent of it? And, with AppDynamics, we can answer that and help them prioritize a rebuild or modernization of the application,” said Beard.
Industry Perspective
Conclusion Application intelligence boils down to better insights — insights into what is wrong with an application, how to better optimize an application’s performance, how an application is advancing the goals of a particular mission and how to develop and launch new or upgraded applications more quickly and with better results. These insights translate into more satisfied end users, lower call center and ticket volumes, faster mean times to resolution (MTTR), less time spent on bridge calls to track down problems, higher velocities for new software releases and, ultimately, better mission outcomes.
About AppDynamics
About GovLoop
AppDynamics is a recognized leader in Application Performance Management, with a significant adoption across the federal government. The AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform is a comprehensive solution enabling government organizations to maximize application and mission performance. Independent research firm Gartner rated AppDynamics No. 1 in “Completeness of Vision” in Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for APM. AppDynamics is also rated high in customer satisfaction with a Net Promoter Score of 85, significantly higher than the scores for the overall software category, which range from the low teens to the mid-40s, and for enterprise software companies, which typically are below 20.
GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 250,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government. For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com. www.govloop.com | @GovLoop
For more information about AppDynamics and its products: 1-415-442-8400 info@appdynamics.com federalsales@appdynamics.com
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Industry Perspective