Round Two – Last time I wrote a blog comparing APM versus network-based APM tools, which I still consider NPM at it’s core regardless of what some critics and competitors claim. Let me make one thing clear though, NPM is great for equipping IT network administrators to see how fast or slow data is traveling through the pipes of their application. Unfortunately, network-based APM tools simply cannot provide App Ops granular visibility into the application runtime when isolating bottlenecks go beyond the system level and it’s final destination – the end user’s browser.

I find several of the blogs and YouTube clips from such NPM vendors quite comical as they try to throw punches at APM companies. Their arguments are centered primarily against agent-based approaches being an inadequate APM solution due to today’s fickle and distributed application architectures. It’s not like I haven’t heard it before.

The amusing thing about it…they’re completely right! In fact, we couldn’t agree more, and that’s why Jyoti Bansal founded AppDynamics to address these perennial shortcomings legacy APM vendors have been ignoring. Even the smallest businesses next to the largest enterprises have complex applications that have outpaced their App Ops teams’ current set of monitoring tools. That’s why AppDynamics is reinventing and reigniting the application performance management space by enabling IT operations to monitor complex, modern applications running in the cloud or the data center. So let me respond to those claims they’ve made.

The Claims

“Agents have high deployment and ongoing maintenance burden.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. No manual instrumentation required. It’s automatic.

“Agents are invasive which can perturb the systems being monitored.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. Our customers see less than 1-2% overhead in production.

“Performance management vendors have over promised and under delivered for decades.”
Legacy APM: TRUE
AppDynamics: FALSE. Things are going well thanks. Check our customer list and 400% growth.

All AppDynamics. The next-gen of APM.

Example FedEx App with application performance issues

I drew a parallel in my previous post that using NPM concepts to monitor application performance is like inspecting Fedex packages en-route to figure out why operations at a hub came to a screeching halt. Remember, even if the package contents is visible from afar, it doesn’t explain why the hub conveyors, which electronically guide packages to their appropriate destination chute is broken, nor can it identify why cargo operations have stalled. In other words, good luck trying to gather anything beyond the scope of the application’s infrastructure. Using network monitoring tools to collect even the most basic system health metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, thread pool consumption and thrashing? Time to throw in the towel.

And what about End User Monitoring?

What’s becoming just as important as being able to monitor server side processing and network time is the ability to monitor end user performance. Jonah Kowall from Gartner pointed out, observing performance from the browser side is not visible from a network perspective. When NPM tools are only able to see the last packet sent from the server, how does that help you understand the browser’s performance? It doesn’t since once again, this kind of analysis is only feasible higher up the stack at the Application Layer. And just to clarify when I say Application Layer, I mean application execution time, not “network process time to application” as defined by OSI Layer 7.

On the other hand, injected agents residing in that layer can insert JavaScript into the Web page to determine the execution time spent in the browser. This is becoming more of a concern for App Ops and Dev Ops now that 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend executing JavaScript, rendering markup and stylesheets according to the research conducted by Steven Souders of Google. As business logic continues it’s migration to the browser while increasing it’s processing burden, the client is looking more and more like the new server. Network monitoring tools must move to an agent-based approach if they are to truly deliver the monitoring visibility needed for the application and end user experience, otherwise their visibility will remain between a rock and a hard place.

On top of that, what about those customers running their applications in a public cloud? Are you going to convince your cloud provider to install a network appliance into their infrastructure? I highly doubt it. With AppDynamics, we have partnerships with cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Azure, RightScale and Opsource allowing developers and operations to easily deploy AppDynamics with a flick of a switch and monitor their applications in production 24/7.

Once again, next-gen APM triumphs over NPM based application performance on not just the server side, but also the browser. AppDynamics is embracing this and fully aware of the technical and business significance of monitoring end user performance. We’re delighted to offer this kind of end-to-end visibility to our customers who will now be able to monitor application performance from the end users’ browser to the backend application tiers (databases, mainframes), all through a single pane of glass view.

• APM vs NPM. Round One.