What Is AppDynamics? Cisco's APM Solution Explained

Cisco AppDynamics is an Application Performance Management (APM) solution that can help your organization make critical, strategic decisions. AppDynamics uses artificial intelligence (AI) to solve application problems and prevent them from occurring in the future, as well as enhancing the visibility into your IT architecture.

AppDynamics is an organization that was founded in 2008 before Cisco acquired it for $3.7 billion in March 2017. It has since become a key driver in the Cisco technology portfolio, offering unparalleled resources that drive the level of innovation needed to meet the demands of modern organizations.

AppDynamics aims to improve the availability and consistency of applications across the full technology stack by providing real-time performance insights. This helps your business enhance the digital experience, optimize performance, and fuel growth.

What AppDynamics does

As an APM solution, AppDynamics provides you with crucial metrics you need to optimize your applications. This includes:

Application performance: Customers' application issues can massively impact their digital experience, and by extension, your brand reputation. Therefore it's critical to avoid downtime that affects or disrupts a user's experience and prevents you from meeting Service-Level Agreements (SLAs).
CPU usage: The central processing unit (CPU) is responsible for executing instructions in computer programs. Any CPU performance degradation can affect disk read and write speeds and create significant memory issues. So AppDynamics tracks CPU usage metrics to avoid these issues.
Error rates: AppDynamics scans for errors, such as web requests, that result in operations failing during memory-intensive processes. This enables you to keep an eye on web requests that could result in application-affecting errors.
Request rates: AppDynamics collects data around spikes in application traffic activity, periods of inactivity and the number of active users. This helps to identify issues with applications and areas of the application that may need optimizing.
Response times: Slow application responses can be mission-critical. Loading times of more than several milliseconds can result in users losing trust in your brand and taking their business elsewhere. With AppDynamics, having historical data on application response times, enables you to track application slowdowns in real-time.

All of these monitoring metrics are aggregated in a visual dashboard which AppDynamics calls a Flowmap. This Flowmap shows direct connections between components of infrastructure and enables organizations to drill down into errors to pinpoint the root cause quickly anywhere in the technology stack.

How AppDynamics benefits organizations

As your IT environment becomes increasingly complex, it's key to have insight into what's happening across your technology stack. AppDynamics provides various application and business benefits which enable you to prioritize decisions based on business impact. The following are a few of the headline benefits of this dynamic solution.

Confident decision-making

AppDynamics connects application performance to business outcomes and customer experience. This enables you to prioritize potentially critical application issues before they become a problem for customers.

Data-led customer experience

The AppDynamics solution enables you to ingest and analyze data across your entire technology stack and transform it into detailed visualizations. This allows you to easily make the right business decisions while enhancing the user experience — and driving better business results.

Infrastructure observability

AppDynamics enables you to observe and visualize your full technology stack, from database and server to cloud-native and hybrid environments. This enables you to optimize your applications by managing key business metrics, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), code-level issues and conversions. Therefore, you can discover the root causes of problems in real-time before they impact your bottom line and user experience.

Advanced network visibility

Gaining insight across your entire technology stack also offers greater visibility of the external networks that your applications rely on. This allows you to quickly resolve issues with connections to Domain Name Service (DNS), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.

All-in-one monitoring

AppDynamics provides your organization with real-time visibility of applications across your public, private and multicloud environments. The solution's low-overhead monitoring and Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) help you to achieve enterprise-level scalability and secure design. This drives IT efficiency with rapid root-cause analysis and quick diagnosis of potential issues. It also enables you to correlate your software and business key performance indicators (KPIs).

Application security

Enhanced visibility of your technology stack offers significant security benefits. This includes rapid detection of application and coding errors or vulnerabilities, which might ordinarily not be discovered for months or even years. AppDynamics allows you to unify business insight and application performance with security insights to guarantee your environment operates securely.

Enhanced teamwork

Technology modernization often creates silos between disparate teams in your organization. But AppDynamics provides a connected platform that enables fast, harmonious and efficient teamwork across departments.

Immediate value

With AppDynamics, you can configure your applications through Smart Code Infrastructure, which provides real-time adaptations based on changes to your application environment.

Are you interested in learning more about how all the capabilities and benefits can help your organization? Reach out today to discover how WWT can help you seamlessly implement AppDynamics even in the most complex IT environments.