AppDynamics announced a new Application Performance Management (APM) offering specifically designed for enterprises incorporating microservices in their application architecture.

This new offering provides powerful end-to-end monitoring for microservices architectures, including the ability to trace transactions across hundreds of microservice calls in production environments.

Microservices are currently one of the leading trends in enterprise IT architectures. Enterprises are breaking up their large, rigid, monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable pieces to increase their agility to meet business demands. With that increased agility and manageability comes increased complexities and challenges for monitoring and troubleshooting applications. Microservices require many more application server instances to run the smaller pieces, creating a significantly larger footprint of application instances. This results in more virtual machines being used and the trend toward containers (such as Docker) as a preferred technology to make those virtual machines lightweight.

Microservices architectures have a unique set of operational management challenges because every user transaction typically goes through hundreds of distinct services, and a problem at any one of those services can impact user experience. Also, microservices architectures are typically accompanied by numerous small development teams deploying new code in production much more frequently.

AppDynamics’ new APM for microservices is designed to address the challenges presented by the complex and highly distributed footprints of microservices architectures. The AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform has the unique ability to identify and track business transactions end-to-end, including all API calls, in real time, through all microservice and infrastructure components to enable customers to rapidly identify and resolve issues — for example, to discover exactly which request caused specific calls to other microservices, and where in that transaction a problem occurred.

AppDynamics also announced a new commercial model for the new offering, which is based on the size of the application runtime. The special microservices pricing will be applicable for any Java virtual machine (JVM) running with a maximum heap size of less than one gigabyte.

“Microservices solve a lot of challenges, and that’s why they’re becoming the standard architecture both within and between applications. We anticipate accelerated adoption of microservices in enterprises this year,” said Dennis Callaghan, Senior Analyst of Infrastructure software at 451 Research. “But, those enterprises need two things in order to effectively monitor microservices architectures. One is the ability to see application and transaction behavior and trace transactions across these increasingly complex and distributed environments. The other is an APM economic model that makes sense and reflects the need to monitor many more smaller instances.”

Enterprise applications are potentially just the tip of the microservices iceberg. A host of digital innovations, including many of the devices and services that make up the burgeoning Internet of Things, will likely depend on microservices to power their interactions.

“The current growth rate of microservices is expected to increase exponentially with adoption of the Internet of Things over the next five years,” said Jonah Kowall,VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics. “This means measuring and assuring these components, and discrete asynchronous transaction tracing, will be essential. AppDynamics arguably has the most robust APM solution to meet these needs today and in the future. And now, we’re leading the way with the first pricing model that aligns with the new architecture. Simply put, if you’re using microservices, you should be using AppDynamics.”