Big news last week was about the JPMC data breach that could potentially impact millions of customers. This news brought about the return of “banks that are too big to fail” discussions on a much smaller scale then we saw during the financial crisis a few years back. The fact is, we live in a world where data breaches can and will happen and the response to these incidents becomes critically important to the company as well as the consumer.
Data at Web Scale
This sequence of events got me thinking about just how big many of our enterprise and consumer applications have become and the problems associated with this new world of “Web Scale”. From a monitoring tool perspective, web scale means collecting massive amounts of data, making sense out of this data using analytics, and visualizing this data using a combination of analytics and new technologies.
At AppDynamics, we’re monitoring single application environments with up to 15,000 components delivering mission critical application services. This is a very unique challenge and one that requires the right combination of analytics and visualization tools. In August we announced the fact that we had brought big data technologies into our summer release (http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/news/appdynamics-summer–2014-release/) and this blog post shows the result with real customer data.
Visualization of a massive application environment
While other APM companies are busy re-architecting their platforms to figure out how to scale their data collection technology to meet the demands of web scale, AppDynamics is years past that challenge and solving the analytics and visualization hurdles. As you can see in the screenshots below, we’ve got great technology that automatically determines what details should be shown and what details should be hidden as you zoom in and out on application flow map.
Shifting the flowmap into fullscreen mode let’s you easily visualize your entire web scale application as seen below.
Clicking on any node in the flow map shows more detail about the health of the associated components along with information useful for troubleshooting problems.
Zooming in on fewer application components automatically shows a much higher level of detail to ensure you have all of the information you need to solve problems.
Built to scale
Monitoring web scale applications is difficult! Trying to retrofit old technology with architectural band-aids just doesn’t scale in today’s modern application environment. If you’ve got web scale applications or if they’re even on your roadmap then you need a system that was built to scale with your business. Try AppDynamics for free today and see what a modern application monitoring platform can do for you.
The post Too Big To Scale – Data Visualizations at Web Scale written by Jim Hirschauer appeared first on Application Performance Monitoring Blog from AppDynamics.