SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, announced the addition of live code profiling to its SaaS-delivered infrastructure and application performance monitoring (APM) solution, AppOptics.

To learn more about the new offering and the impact it may have on SolarWinds customers, I spoke with Keith Kuchler, Vice President of Engineering at SolarWinds.

VMblog:  What's new in the latest update to your AppOptics solution?

Keith Kuchler:  The latest enhancement to our AppOptics product includes the integration of live code profiling, which provides a breakdown of the most frequently called functions and methods in a transaction. Profiling is gathered in a manner tailored to each language, and includes information down to the class, method, and even filename and line number.

This latest feature update also does not require custom code changes, providing an off-the-shelf solution with full visibility into applications. The combined functionality is the latest milestone for our AppOptics solution, as we continue to deliver easy-to-use, yet powerful application performance monitoring, that empowers users to make data-driven decisions about applications and infrastructure issues. 

VMblog:  Where did the inspiration for the live code profiling functionality come from?

Kuchler:  Our customers. At SolarWinds, we have a long history of sourcing insights from our customers to better understand the challenges facing DevOps, AppOps, and WebOps teams today and ultimately deliver a solution that solves real problems.

In the case of AppOptics, as application updates become more frequent, it is even more important to identify both new and common errors, exceptions, and their root cause. But in conversations with our customers, we realized there was a monitoring blind spot out there: with distributed tracing, users had visibility into the performance of an application or workload but couldn't pinpoint where a code change should be made. After all, looking for issues in lines of code can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.

We worked closely with an AppOptics customer to develop the live code profiling feature and address this monitoring blind spot. It's a testament to what we can achieve by listening to the needs of our users.

VMblog:  How does the latest feature simplify troubleshooting for users?

Kuchler:  Everyone is consuming applications and as such, touchpoints between and within applications are becoming more and more intertwined. Without this level of visibility, it's difficult for users to truly understand their infrastructure and how it performs.

The integration of live code profiling delivers a deeper set of data to customers that shows not only the length of time spent in an application, but also the percentage of time spent in an area of that application. A customer might realize they're spending 88 percent of time rendering a header, for example. This level of application data translates into actionable insights for developers, who can immediately determine whether code changes made an application faster or slower. 

In combination with distributed tracing functionality, the latest edition of AppOptics empowers the teams supporting an application to monitor across many program languages and trace requests through one's complete infrastructure to identify exactly where the bottlenecks are, dramatically reduce time to resolution, and improve user experience.

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