AppDynamics Inc., the richly funded performance monitoring company, is aiming to take information technology’s value up a notch with the release of a new monitoring engine that connects business results to operational analytics.

Business iQ is the fifth component in the company’s App iQ suite of applications, which take a big data analytics approach to understanding system behaviors and deriving operational intelligence from them. AppDynamics uses agents and bots to monitor code as it executes and trace anomalies back to their source (above). Other components in the suite do things like visualize customer journeys, monitor performance against baseline metrics and diagnose problems down to the code execution level.

The new release is intended to establish a more direct link between IT operations and business outcomes, said Matthew Chotin, director of product management. Examples of questions the toolkit can answer include how a new release impacts the user experience, how that experience compares to the previous experience and how code releases impact business processes, he said.

“We’re basically watching your code. Whatever data is flowing through your system, we’re able to interpret it and analyze it,” Chotin said. The product can track Java and .NET code out of the box, and can be customized to track PPH, Node.js, Python and C/C++, as well as Apache and a variety of databases.

Real-time business intelligence

AppDynamics is positioning Business iQ as a sort of real-time business intelligence tool that organizations can use to track performance on the fly through code monitoring. “When a user hits an entry point into your application, we watch code execute all the way through to the database and then back,” Chotin said. “Users are able to indicate which of these transactions are relevant. That lets us move away from looking at CPU activity and toward checkout and shopping carts, for example.”

He cited the example of an airline being able to monitor activity on its reservation site to verify that customers are successfully booking travel plans, tracking in-flight Wi-Fi activity to verify that performance is up to snuff and monitoring transactions on flight attendants’ mobile devices to ensure that in-flight customer service is going well. “It’s about IT providing relevant information in real time so that everybody’s working on customer experience,” he said.

User session monitoring in Business iQ enables deep queries to be constructed using AppDynamics Query Language, a SQL-like language that examines user sessions to identify business outcomes using machine learning. Marketers can use this insight to conduct conversion funnel analysis and segmentation on live data.

Enhancements to ADQL include calculated values and mathematical operators to enable companies to derive metrics and key performance indicators such as the percentage of revenue driven by different product categories. Mathematical operators can now be used on numeric fields as well as aggregations, and users can intelligently segment queries through a “Filter” command.

New funnel visualizations create key performance indicators related to bounce rate, conversion rate and the number of people who abandon a process at each step. A redesigned funnel makes it easy to visualize and understand user impact due to performance issues, the company said.

The eight-year-old company has been under a microscope since it raised $158 million a year ago and brought in a new chief executive who told TechCrunch, “I was brought in to take this company public, and that’s what I intend to do.” Investors are still waiting, though. AppDynamics has raised more than $314 million from a blue-chip investor list but has yet to file for a public offering, despite engaging some high profile Wall Street bankers toward that end this summer.

AppDynamics prices on an “agent unit” basis, with units equating to the type of code being monitored. Pricing for the AppDynamics Pro suite begins at $3,600 per unit per year. Full pricing details are published here.

Image courtesy of AppDynamics