AppDynamics is well-known for its networking and application monitoring solutions. Now, they have a new offering for their users that leverages the AWS Lambda service.
AWS Lambda, the Amazon cloud’s answer for serverless computing, allows users to provide code to run (usually in response to events) whenever they need it. Users don’t have to manage servers or provision servers. These are often referred to as “serverless services”
However, for actions such as application performance monitoring, that model can present challenges not seen in the traditional application/server/network approach.
AppDynamics pointed out that Lambda workloads can easily be spun up and down as needed, which can help with scaling issues. Aaron Newcomb, a company blogger, stated that serverless workloads can impact the overall performance and stability of your application environment. These workloads are transient and can present a challenge to teams that need to connect issues across their applications environment or see the impact serverless applications have on end users, or even the business.
AppDynamics was acquired by Cisco in 2017. It is an “applications Intelligence” company that provides real-time insight into user, business, and application performance. According to the company, its monitoring solutions give users an integrated view of the code of an application and the state of the network. This allows operators to boost performance and improve the user experience.
AppDynamics, now in beta, is pointing out that approach to AWS Lambda. It also announced a new family application agents to give users more visibility by leveraging serverless microservices.
Newcomb stated that serverless users can now gain insight into the response times, throughput, and exception rates of applications that use services built in a mix of serverless and traditional runtimes in the same way as we do for traditional applications. Newcomb stated that the new solution helps users to visualize business and end-user impacts in serverless scenarios. This can help teams prioritize issues and optimize the performance of changing workloads.
The beta serverless agent beta version 1 only works with Java microservices that are running in AWS Lambda. Cloud pros interested in the beta program can apply here (for “qualified customers”).
