We’re all very familiar with seeing our own personal views of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Depending on who and what we’ve liked or followed, our feeds are fueled by our personal interests. Consumer apps are full of examples of these customized views. Think about your steps taken on Fitbit, favorite playlists on Spotify, or even your past grocery purchases on AmazonFresh.
Forward-thinking business software developers are following a parallel path. The more user-centric enterprise apps offer a similar level of customization and personalization, and these are especially valuable when monitoring business apps. AppDynamics application performance monitoring solutions, for example, have built-in templates that allow developers and operations managers to build customizable dashboards. Organizations using these dashboards can address performance issues and gain important business insights.
Dashboards with relevant, contextual data
Rich, user-centric dashboards are imperative in today’s highly competitive business environments. Previously, table-based reports and spreadsheets were the only options to share performance information, and they were all based on historical data.
Performance monitoring tools also leaned heavily on real-time alerts to notify system administrators and operations managers when infrastructure and platforms were nearing failure levels and apps were performing poorly. Unfortunately, these alerts were often guilty of false positives, sending staff on time-wasting troubleshooting missions. Staff also received the alerts too late when a real crisis hit, and they were rarely able to proactively fix the problem and avoid performance lags that hurt business activities.
Dashboards — especially customizable ones — are valuable workarounds to these less-than-perfect reporting options. To monitor app performance, AppDynamics supports the creation of customizable dashboards that contain specialized, relevant information for the operations team, developers, executive management, and others who need to stay informed about app performance and business activities.
Customized for your unique workday
A custom dashboard enables you to bring together, on one screen, specific metrics and data points that are important for monitoring your applications. They can display application, server, and database metrics, and they can be used in conjunction with the built-in dashboards (such as the application dashboard or tier dashboard) in AppDynamics so that you can visualize the entire workflow through your applications and services. For example, dashboards could track top-level application health, performance of individual brands, user experiences on key pages, and the number of transactions.
Custom dashboards provide all sorts of value to a business. They can:
- Provide a view of application performance customized to your needs
- Aggregate data from different applications
- Compare overall application or infrastructure performance against individual tier or node performance
- Show a standard set of metrics for multiple tiers and nodes
- Compare data from different applications
- Show a single view of both live and historical data
- Share performance data with other users and stakeholders
For a better understanding of how to put these dashboards to work in your business, here are four examples of how businesses and individual users keep their organizations at peak performance with customizable dashboards.
Operations Manager tracks retail activities
The operations manager at an online shoe retailer relies on a customized dashboard to track overall activities of its search-enabled e-commerce site. From a single screen, the ops manager can view application response time, end user response time, CPU utilization, memory utilization, and application load. The dashboard can track activities over the past hour, day, month, or any requested timeframe. Understanding the combined data ensures that the operations manager can keep the site up and running to meet sales goals and provide the shopping experience that customers expect.
Operations Team keeps support center running smoothly
At a high-volume support center, the ops team uses a customized dashboard to better understand VoIP performance. The dashboard tracks CPU usage, node response time, call load per node, and more so that customer service representatives can quickly respond to customer inquiries. The dashboard also tracks the e-commerce server so that the ops team can relate incoming calls to online activities. All this data works together to keep the call center running smoothly and address customer needs quickly.
Executive Management follows sales performance
An executive at a travel and leisure company has a customized dashboard designed to only show relevant information that he requests for. His dashboard view shows sales volume per hour, day and week; total revenue, total purchases, failed purchases, and website response times for user logins, shopping cart purchases, and searches. The combined data helps the executive understand how well the business is performing and the impact that the business applications are having on overall business health.
Devs Team optimizes app performance
Application developers also find customized dashboards valuable throughout an app’s lifecycle. When testing or updating an application, the devs team can track business transaction response time, error rates, and overall application response time. Based on pie charts and usage graphs, the dev team can visualize how the app is performing and make improvements when necessary.
Dashboards built for your business
These are only a few of the many ways that businesses are using customizable dashboards in AppDynamics. In every scenario, the dashboards, loaded with valuable contextual information, are helping operations teams, developers, and executives improve overall business performance. What makes these dashboards unique is that you can build them to fit your specific role and share them, as needed, with others who have questions, need answers, and have a stake in making the business run better and be more competitive.
In today’s app-centric world, application performance lies at the heart of business success. AppDynamics provides performance monitoring solutions which ensure that your apps —and your business — are running at optimal performance.
Trianz and AppDynamics, both leaders in their fields, are combining their industry-recognized consulting services and application performance solutions. Their unique expertise and technology will help you prepare your organization for emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, machine learning, Big Data, and blockchain, and will assist you in better supporting the apps, systems and platforms you already have in place.
