How Unified Analytics can help drive digital transformation
There is a perfect storm brewing inside enterprise companies — increasingly revenues are shifting to digital while consumers are demanding exceptional user experience. What used to be brand loyalty is now application loyalty, resulting in legacy Fortune 500 brands falling off the list at a faster pace. Rapid technology innovation and exploding application complexity have made things worse for IT / DevOps practitioners who are increasingly under pressure to provide the business with real-time insights into application intelligence.
What all of this means is that the need for digital transformation, where companies use software to transform user engagement and increase business agility, is real. Enterprises must pursue digital transformation to successfully compete for users and remain relevant in today’s hyper-competitive and fast-changing marketplace. Among others, a huge burden to take on digital transformation falls squarely on the CIOs shoulders. This presents a unique opportunity for CIOs to utilize an application intelligence strategy as a driver to partner with business to drive exceptional user experience and business outcomes.
As part of the Winter ’16 Release, AppDynamics, the leading Application Intelligence Platform company, announced significant enhancements to its Application Analytics solution that makes it an essential tool to support software-defined enterprises planning for, or in the midst, of a digital transformation. The updated Application Analytics provides the deep, timely, actionable insights needed to proactively manage user experience, and to accurately correlate application performance with business metrics — two essential pillars for the success of digitally-driven businesses.
Introducing Unified Analytics
With a next-generation Unified Analytics solution, customers can automatically collect and correlate data with business context from multiple data sets including transactions, logs, mobile, browser and custom data without having to worry about application code changes. AppDynamics agents automatically collect this data from the application and correlate it in real-time so customers can gain insights into operational performance, user experience, and business value to optimize software strategy.
How is it done today?
Contrary to our approach, traditional IT operation analytics tools were designed to work well within technology silos, but today’s application environments burst through those silos. Applications are complex, distributed, and continuously changing. As a result, operations personnel find themselves in the difficult role of having to manage different point solutions across a fragmented IT environment.
These tools typically require extensive manual configuration to set up and maintain, and then only provide static views of applications or environments that are increasingly dynamic. Changes in the application or environment often require rewriting code, sourcing new data sets, make relevant correlations, and finally build and run queries, which are the last things any ops person has the time or desire to undertake.
The difference here is that the AppDynamics Application Analytics solution breaks those data silos and empower customers to understand how the application performance is impacting the bottom line. Enterprises can now answer more meaningful questions than ever before and get comprehensive IT operational intelligence that goes beyond application code. Leveraging this data, CIOs, and IT/DevOps practitioners are armed to optimize the user journey to increase conversions and achieve business goals. All of this is achieved without writing a single line of code to deliver business impact insights of application performance.
Proof is in the pudding…
In a recent survey “Business Impact of User Experience” survey, conducted by analyst firm Dimensional Research, which included responses from 423 web and mobile application stakeholders, found 77 percent say their metrics exist in “data silos” and most of those — 74 percent — say that lack of integration impacts their ability to use performance data effectively. Also, while 88 percent say it is valuable to know the dollar cost of poor user experience, only 38 percent can quantify it. Most CIOs (61 percent) want — but don’t have the ability to track — business impact and performance metrics in real-time.
Rounding up Application Analytics Winter ’16 highlights
Introducing Browser and Mobile Analytics – data enterprises can gain a deep understanding of user experience in aggregate, to optimize user journey, increase engagement and impact business outcomes. Through the integrated browser, mobile, and custom user data, you can keep track of constantly moving users and gain deep user insights.
Smart Logs – Industry’s first auto-correlation of transactions and logs allow deep learnings and faster resolution into failed business transactions. This powerful enhancement means IT / DevOps practitioners can use APM to find the issue in seconds and then use Smart Logs to quickly auto-correlate to a root cause.
AppDynamics Query Language – ADQL makes data accessible via an SQL-like dynamic query language to enable advanced, fast, nested data searches across multiple datasets and supports rapid ad hoc analysis in real time.
Out of the box widgets and interactive custom dashboards – make the insights compelling for any digital transformation initiative via a suite of advanced widgets and interactive custom dashboards. New reporting capabilities also make it fast and easy to share results with other team members and senior management.
Rounding out the list of major updates to Application Analytics is the role-based security control that enhances security for sensitive business and customer data while at the same time simplifying access for users within the context of their permissions.
Summary
Bridging the gap between application performance, user experience, and business metrics is a must have for companies aspiring to win the competition for providing exceptional customer experience. Tying user experience and business metrics through a single-pane-of-glass help executives make smart decisions that influence business outcomes. It also enables CIOs to get in the driver seat to steer digital transformation.
In a nutshell, Application Analytics connects the dots in real time between user behavior, application performance, and business metrics, so enterprises can take the actions needed to meet their business goals.
Interested in learning more about Unified Analytics? Check out our free webinar.
