AppDynamics announced AppDynamics Fall 2014 Release. This latest iteration of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence platform introduces powerful new collaboration tools and unprecedented visibility into complex transactions.

The feature-packed release also includes support for additional platforms, a massively scalable data store, AppDynamics Application Analytics, and integration of AppDynamics database monitoring into the main AppDynamics platform.

The new Virtual War Room tops the list of DevOps collaboration features debuting in the Fall 2014 release. It enables IT operations, development teams and business users to see and resolve problems together in a shared virtual space. The new release also enables scheduled, auto-delivered reports, and adds a new iOS app that sends push notifications to team members when system alerts are triggered.

These collaborative tools enable all the application stakeholders — IT, business, marketing — to see the same dashboards, metrics, and reports and work together for faster resolution of issues and general agreement on application priorities.

“The closer teams can work together, the more effective they can be, in IT or any area of business,” said Jyoti Bansal, AppDynamics founder and CEO. “We’ve all seen the tremendously positive impact the DevOps phenomenon has had. With our new Virtual War Room and the other tools introduced today, we are catalyzing DevOps collaboration for troubleshooting, as well as application development, in ways that no other APM platform can do. Performance isn’t just about technology, as critical as that is — it’s also very much about people working together closely to get things done faster and more effectively.”

Powerful New Collaboration Tools

One of the biggest challenges IT organizations face in trying to solve urgent application issues is bringing everyone together on the same page, to see the same data, and reach conclusions together. Typically, a mix of communication tools are involved — phone calls, chat, emails, in-person discussions, etc. — which often leaves the team collectively out of sync. The AppDynamics Virtual War Room solves those issues by creating a virtual space where everyone — development, operations and business users — can see the same data, chat, make changes to application configuration and settings in real time, and collaborate on every level, in the same space. Such collaboration radically shortens time-to-resolution for application issues and reduces their business impact. The results of this process then can be captured and indexed in knowledge management systems to streamline future troubleshooting.

Shareable reports are an additional collaborative feature that enables DevOps teams to preconfigure reports to be automatically generated and fired off to key stakeholders — versus the old system of manually configuring and mailing reports. Like the Virtual War Room, this feature ensures that all stakeholders are looking at the same data, so their collaboration can be more meaningful and effective.

Rounding out the list of enhanced collaborative functionality is a new iOS application that sends push notifications to team members so they can be aware of system events even when they are not in their office, or don’t have access to their laptop.

Greater Visibility into Complex Applications

Extending its leadership in visibility for complex application environments, the Fall 2014 Release enables increased visibility into application processes that have heretofore been less than crystal clear.

Cross-Application Flow. What defines a business process or an application is often a logical notion, rather than a tangible construct. Large enterprises typically rely on multiple large applications and service-oriented architectures, and any given business process will often span more than one application — sales-inventory-fulfillment-shipping is a prime example — making it difficult to see and monitor the process from start to finish. The new AppDynamics Cross-Application Flow feature enables app-to-app metrics and flow map visualizations, and snapshot drill-downs to different applications, so operations teams can see how applications are interacting with shared services. Access control and permissions allow fine-grained control over who is able to access application data, in order to respect the ownership integrity of each application.

Deep visibility into asynchronous transactions. The Fall 2014 Release offers greater visibility than any other APM solution into asynchronous transactions — those that don’t linearly or continuously progress from point A to point B, and that have defied tracking until now. AppDynamics automatically traces and monitors all async requests, and now with the Fall 2014 Release, tracks overall latency and gives users the ability to visualize latency, and to configure demarcation points of long-running async transactions.

Highly accurate visibility into WebSocket requests. Many APM solutions are fooled into thinking WebSocket requests are very slow or stalled because they go so long without detectable activity. Now with the new AppDynamics Fall 2014 Release, customers can see their WebSocket connections, identify the business transaction, and monitor true latency, so IT operations teams can identify truly abnormal behavior.

Expanded Platform Support

Extending its core monitoring capabilities for Java, .NET, PHP, and Node.js applications, AppDynamics now supports:

- Integration platforms such as WebMethods and TIBCO

- Automatic discovery of Cassandra backends

- Monitoring of SQL Azure DB cloud-based database services

- Real-user monitoring of single-page browser applications

- Monitoring of C/C++ applications (in beta)

Massively Scalable Big Data Platform

Customers can now capture, store, and analyze trillions of events and billions of time-series metrics, as AppDynamics has now made its data platform even more massively scalable to support an increasing range of data types including performance events, transactions, click streams and user sessions.

Introducing AppDynamics Application Analytics

With the introduction of Application Analytics, AppDynamics now empowers IT departments to not only harvest meaningful data for its own management needs, but also to provide business units with vital metrics they can use to optimize user engagement, conversion, and ultimately, revenue.

Application Analytics automatically propagates end-to-end business transaction context across analytics datasets in highly distributed environments, with ZERO application code changes required. By leveraging Application Analytics, business and IT users can now quickly unlock actionable insights to answer more meaningful questions than ever before and all in real time.

Integrated Database Monitoring

Rounding out the highlights of the Fall 2014 Release is the seamless integration of database monitoring into the AppDynamics Application Intelligence platform. Now with a single user interface, customers can troubleshoot applications and drill down into databases without leaving the user interface.