AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring

Real-time processing has been the dominant theme in the analytics world this past week, with several major updates from different parts of the industry adding up to provide a sudden burst of momentum for the fast-emerging paradigm. It all started when Apache Storm graduated from incubation to take its place among the top-level projects that make up the Hadoop ecosystem.

Storm began its life as an internal project at a little-known social media marketing startup called BackType Inc., which was fairly active in the open-source scene for an emerging player but otherwise kept under the radar. That all changed in 2011 when it became part of Twitter Inc., which promptly followed up the acquisition with a pledge to continue the team’s community focus. And sure enough, the source code for Storm was released under an Apache license two years later.

Written in Clojure, the technology makes it possible to process data streams such as Twitter feeds and sensory input leveraging Hadoop, which opens the door for organizations to analyze real-time and historical data in the same place. That functionality eliminates the need to maintain separate environments for each task, thereby significantly reducing both hardware requirements and management costs while doing away with the hassle involved in integrating the different workload types.

Syncsort Inc., a former mainframe software vendor that now helps organizations move sensitive information off their big iron, is touting a similar value proposition for its latest solution. Ironstream “continuously pulls data” from legacy hardware and into Splunk’s real-time log management platform, according to its maker, allowing customers to make previously inaccessible records available for new use cases without disrupting their existing operating environment. Since a sizable portion of traditional organizations still rely on their mainframes for supporting mission-critical applications, that functionality has the potential to prove immensely helpful in driving the adoption of modern analytics.

Over at the opposite end of the enterprise landscape, a company called AppDynamics Inc. is putting its own spin on real-time analytics with a focus on the mobile services that enterprise workers use to access their data. The newly released freemium edition of the company’s Mobile Real-User Monitoring allows users to continuously track key metrics about their apps, including everything from minor performance hiccups to crashes, and filter that data for useful insights about their code and users.

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