AppDynamics, the application monitoring provider that Cisco Systems Inc. acquired for $3.7 billion in January, argues there’s need for more of a business perspective in technology operations.

The company is addressing the requirement with an analytics tool called Business iQ that comes as part of its flagship operational intelligence platform. Today, AppDynamics unveiled new features for the software intended to help technology professionals stay more in sync with the business processes they’re supporting.

The first highlight is a capability called Business Journeys. Thanks to the addition, AppDynamics said, customers will gain the ability to visualize data from multiple systems in one dashboard to gain a better view of important activity. A company looking to track sales, for example, could bring together transaction data from its mobile apps and web store.

What makes the feature stand out is that Business iQ can correlate such data with backend operational metrics. The volume of e-commerce transactions may be displayed next to, say, the number of errors experienced by a company’s shopping cart software. Users thus gain the ability to quickly spot when a technical problem is causing a drop-off in purchases without having to waste time manually digging through system logs.

For added measure, Business iQ packs an alerting mechanism that can be used to immediately notify personnel when an issue crops up. A new customization option that was unveiled alongside Business Journeys adds the ability to customize rules for different situations. In the case of an e-commerce site, the operator could give priority to problems affecting high-value customers.

AppDynamics is rolling out the Business iQ upgrades alongside two other notable enhancements. The first is a machine learning tool that can analyze application performance issues to identify the metrics with the highest relevance for troubleshooting teams, such as the load on the servers or network speed. The other enhancement is the addition of support for connected devices.

Companies can now use AppDynamics’ platform to troubleshoot endpoints and see how they influence businesses processes. Seeing that everything from point-of-sale systems to light bulbs is getting connected to the web these days, this new feature has the potential to be a major boon.

AppDynamics says that the new version of Business iQ is currently in technical preview.

Image: AppDynamics