AppDynamics is introducing a new application performance management (APM) offering designed for enterprises incorporating microservices in their application architecture. This new offering provides end-to-end monitoring for microservices architectures, including the ability to trace transactions across hundreds of microservice calls in production environments.
The introduction of AppDynamics’ new APM for microservices is a result of the emergence of microservices as one of the leading trends in enterprise IT architectures. As enterprises are breaking up their large, monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable pieces to increase their agility to meet business demands, they are experiencing corresponding complexities and challenges for monitoring and troubleshooting applications.
Microservices can 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 also offer a unique set of operational management challenges as 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 can be 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. Utilizing AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform enterprises have the 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.
AppDynamics has announced an updated 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.