AppDynamics announced AppDynamics Application Analytics, a powerful new solution that provides real-time IT operations and business operations intelligence from across distributed application environments.

Application Analytics automatically collects meaningful data in its business context from the entire application stack, no matter how complex or distributed. This data with business context enables IT not only to manage IT operations, but also to provide business units with vital metrics they can use to optimize user engagement, conversion, and ultimately, revenue. It is a true big data analytics platform that enables stakeholders to instantly analyze transactions, manage performance, and determine current and potential impact across the business in real time.

Application Analytics captures raw business data from every line of code in all layers of an application and across every single node, without requiring code changes or additional infrastructure. There is no need for coding, as is required to collect data from log files. And unlike data warehousing, which can only provide historical snapshots of completed transactions, Application Analytics provides an up-to-the-minute, real-time view into transactions that are in flight.

The solution is easy to deploy and massively scalable, capable of handling a trillion metrics daily.

“Application Analytics addresses the biggest data challenges enterprises face today — volume, velocity, and variety,” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “Huge volumes of data are being generated at blinding speed, and it’s coming from every direction — the cloud, different devices, and complex application infrastructures. But it’s just so much noise if it can’t be efficiently harvested and parsed. That’s what Application Analytics does. With the lens of business context, no matter how fast the data comes at you, it quickly makes sense, and gives a basis for smart, insightful decision-making.”

With a solution that is easy to deploy and massively scalable, and capable of handling a trillion metrics daily, Application Analytics enables IT operations to gain intelligence faster than ever before, seeing errors, slowdowns, and outages in real time. Armed with this data, business and IT can collaborate and act quickly to minimize business impact. At the same time, the data it captures can be used to engage those users who have been negatively impacted to mitigate any negative brand impact.

“The challenge to date has been the abundance of solutions for unstructured data analysis, which still require the application to log the correct and relevant data from within the application. This requires a specific type of maturity within an organization, such as developers logging relevant metrics as defined by the business stakeholders or product management professionals,” said Jonah Kowall, Research VP at Gartner. “Alternate approaches have begun to emerge from leading APM providers, which leverage the solution's placement (and viewpoint from) within the application; hence they are able to automatically extract business logic demonstrated in transactional execution. The coupling of this context with detailed information about end-user experience and user interactions with applications themselves, provides a rich set of data that requires no development resources as long as the applications are built on modern technology.”

Application Analytics Use Cases

- Business impact analysis. Quantify the dollars-and-cents impact of stalls and outages, and identify and communicate with impacted customers to recover their business and preserve a positive brand perception.

- Business operations monitoring. Pinpoint where in the process a transaction is stuck, and know how to resolve it.

- Performance analytics. Identify poor-performing transactions and understand the cause in order to prioritize IT investments.

- Customer analytics. Understand user behavior and usage trends to optimize user engagement and conversions.

- SLA management. Real-time reporting on service level agreement performance.

AppDynamics Application Analytics, which completed its beta as “Transaction Analytics,” will be available with the Fall 2014 Release.