News

Monitoring Firm AppDynamics Unveils AWS Lambda Offering

• By David Ramel
• 01/28/2019

AppDynamics, known for its application and networking monitoring solutions, unveiled a new offering specifically for its users leveraging the AWS Lambda service.

AWS Lambda is the Amazon cloud's answer to serverless computing, where users can provide code to run -- usually in response to events -- when needed without having to provision or manage servers. These are commonly referred to as "serverless microservices."

However, for actions such as application performance monitoring, that model can present challenges not seen in the traditional application/server/network approach.

AppDynamics noted Lambda workloads can be spun up or down as needed and can help resolve scaling issues. "But that’s not to say these serverless workloads don’t impact the overall performance of your application environment," said the company's Aaron Newcomb in a Jan. 23 blog post. "In fact, since these workloads are transient in nature, they represent a real challenge for teams who need to correlate an issue across their application environment, or see the impact that serverless applications are having on end users—or even on the business itself."

AppDynamics, acquired by Cisco in 2017, is an "applications intelligence" company said to provide real-time insights into application, user and business performance. The company says its monitoring solutions provide users with an integrated view of an application's code and the state of the underlying network in order to help operators boost performance and enhance the user experience.

Now, in a beta product, AppDynamics is pointing that approach to AWS Lambda, announcing a new family of application agents to provide more visibility to users leveraging serverless microservices.

"In the same way that we collect and baseline metrics and events for traditional applications, we can now help serverless users gain deep insight into response times, throughput and exception rates in applications using services built in any mixture of serverless and conventional runtimes," Newcomb said. By helping users visualize end-user and business impacts in serverless scenarios, he said, the new solution can help teams prioritize issue-resolution efforts and optimize the performance of such changing workloads.

The first version of the new family of beta serverless agents works only with Java microservices running in AWS Lambda. To apply for the beta program (for "qualified customers"), interested cloud pros can go here.