San Francisco - January 23, 2019 - AppDynamics, a Cisco company and the leader in application intelligence, today announced the Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda, the first of AppDynamics’ special purpose agents built to show the impact serverless functions can have on applications within the larger context of the business and end user experience. For the first time, businesses will have a complete view into how the performance of serverless functions correlates with the rest of an application’s ecosystem, including hybrid and multi-cloud environments, to give you full visibility into the impact on user experience, application performance and business impact.

Companies are on a constant quest to build the most efficient applications humanly possible. For that reason, many have turned to serverless computing for its cost-cutting, infrastructure minimizing benefits. However, the qualities of serverless computing that make it so compelling also surface new challenges for businesses. Their ephemeral nature of being on one second and disappearing the next make it difficult to pinpoint how it impacts application performance. 

“The freedom from server management complexities has empowered developers to focus on what they care most about, delivering the highest quality code, faster, and at scale. But it also has negative side effects. Holes start appearing in user journeys, causing war rooms to erupt with confusion around what is really happening within the application,” said Prathap Dendi, General Manager, Growth Initiatives and Commercialization, AppDynamics. “The AppDynamics Serverless Agent paints a clear picture of how serverless functions impact each transaction served by an application and ultimately how they influence customer experience, which puts an end to baseless finger-pointing situations.” 

Introducing the Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda

AppDynamics’ Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda brings the powerful end-to-end Business Transaction context AppDynamics is known for into the serverless environment. The Serverless Agent builds on the broadest coverage in the industry, which spans business applications like SAP, trusted mainframes such as IBM and AWS cloud environments. Supporting AWS Lambda functions implemented in Java is the first of AppDynamics’ new special purpose serverless agent family with additional languages and support for additional cloud providers in the works. 

• End-to-End Transaction Monitoring
• With AppDynamics’ patented Business Transaction technology, its Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda is the only solution on the market that captures how serverless operates in the wider context of your application and business. AppDynamics creates a full application topology that understands how applications are built and how the different components, serverless and traditional, impact user experience, application performance and business outcomes.

• Business Intelligence
• As a first-class citizen in AppDynamics’ monitoring suite, users can connect the impact serverless application performance has on their business objectives. By converging serverless and infrastructure data with business performance data, companies can fully understand how critical KPIs are affected. 

• Cloud Scale
• The Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda gives businesses visibility into serverless application beyond the function itself. This can help businesses scale their serverless/hybrid applications efficiently without losing visibility or causing alert fatigue. The lightweight agent enables scale without requiring significant CPU, memory, network bandwidth, storage, or admin overhead.

“The way companies build and release applications has evolved quickly over the past few years. However, the way companies monitor applications hasn’t kept up. The number of siloed monitoring solutions within a single application has grown exponentially causing huge gaps in visualizing application health. Introduce serverless computing and you double the chance for blind spots” said Stephen Elliot at IDC Research. “AppDynamics’ holistic approach to the problem helps make serverless truly production ready for enterprise organizations. Without full visibility, serverless runtime overhead could rise unexpectedly, and concurrency limits for scaling could lead to performance headaches in high-load situations." 

AppDynamics’ Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda is available for Beta trial for existing SaaS customers with Java Lambda functions. Click here to apply to participate.

Additional Information

• Learn more about the Cisco and AppDynamics vision for the Central Nervous System
• Learn more about the AppDynamics Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda
• Read more about the Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda on the AppDynamics blog

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About AppDynamics

AppDynamics is the Application Intelligence company. With AppDynamics, enterprises have real-time insights into application performance, user performance and business performance so they can move faster in an increasingly sophisticated, software-driven world. AppDynamics’ integrated suite of applications is built on its innovative, enterprise-grade App iQ Platform that enables its customers to make faster decisions that enhance customer engagement and improve operational and business performance. AppDynamics is uniquely positioned to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex application environments at scale.