AppDynamics, now owned by Cisco Systems, has launched a developer toolkit and major software updates as part of its Spring 2017 release. Although the toolkit mainly targets software developers and DevOps professionals, we're watching to see if or how MSPs and channel partners embrace it for their service catalogs.
The release is designed to help enterprise application development teams deliver high-quality web and mobile applications more quickly, Cisco said. The toolkit, which is generally available now, will help development teams build, test, analyze and improve upon application products, delivering features and fixes faster and more reliably, the company asserts.
“Today, the application is the business, creating immense pressure on organizations to deliver new experiences that ‘wow’ customers,” Bhaskar Sunkara (pictured), chief technical officer and head of product at AppDynamics, said in a prepared statement. “And digital leaders continually raise the bar for what consumers expect from application experiences. With our new Developer Toolkit, companies can give their application teams the context of how their code impacts the business and deliver innovation like a digital leader.”
New Features for App Developers
The new toolkit provides transparency into the development lifecycle, from the code to end-user experiences and business outcomes, Cisco said. Using the tool, all team members can see the impact their work has on the business in real time.
The toolkit includes support for the increasingly popular programming language Go (GoLang) and cross-platform development software Xamarin, which is used to deliver native iOS, Android and Windows apps using existing teams, skills and code.
It includes new extensions to help developers integrate and test their apps, new dashboards that provide insight into how customers experience apps, and a mobile scorecard that shows at-a-glance metrics on crash rates, number of crashes, network request performance and error rates.
The updates to Enterprise iQ and Business iQ software include flexibility to assign and reassign licenses, faster deployment and maintenance of agents, and more powerful metrics.
Channel Partner Opportunities
The new release comes just two weeks after Cisco completed its purchase of AppDynamics in a move that potentially reshapes the market for application performance monitoring – a high-growth segment with increasing opportunities for MSPs and channel partners.
AppDynamics is part of Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins' push to transform the company from a hardware-centric organization toward software and recurring revenues. AppDynamics began building a more formalized partner program after the 2013 arrival of Matthew Polly, VP of worldwide alliances and business development. The program accelerated in 2015.
Tools like AppDynamics could help MSPs to extend beyond infrastructure monitoring (PCs, servers, networks) toward application monitoring and troubleshooting. Multiple APM vendors -- including Datadog (new to the market), CA Technologies, Dynatrace and New Relic -- are starting to engage MSPs as potential customers and partners. Many of the offerings allow MSPs to monitor and troubleshoot customer applications both on-premises, in private clouds, or in public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
