On September 21, Datadog announced the release of an Application Performance Management product to its core SaaS product for monitoring cloud infrastructures. Datadog’s Application Performance Management solution is designed to help developers understand and optimize application performance, with a specific focus on applications hosted in hybrid cloud, container or micro-services infrastructures. Datadog’s experience in infrastructure monitoring positions it strongly to enter an application performance management space featuring the likes of New Relic and AppDynamics. Moreover, the company’s expertise in monitoring cloud-based infrastructures renders it uniquely qualified to manage application performance on cloud platforms given the intersection between infrastructure and application performance as noted below by Datadog’s Chief Product Officer, Amit Agarwal:
Most APM tools on the market today are designed to troubleshoot coding issues in isolation. However, in modern cloud-scale applications, quickly resolving problems requires examining changes in both the infrastructure and code simultaneously.
Here, Agarwal remarks on the importance of examining application-related issues within the broader context of the infrastructure on which applications run. Application-related performance bottlenecks or other “coding issues,” Agarwal notes, should no longer be understood separately from their associated infrastructure components and instead require a framework that facilitates a holistic analysis of their root causes with attention to both the application and infrastructure layers. Given the dynamism specific to cloud computing infrastructures as evinced by instances, clusters and containers that are variously launched, spun down or assume different relationships with one another, Datadog’s specialization in cloud infrastructure monitoring and analytics positions it to take a leadership position in the application monitoring space, particularly given the proliferation of cloud-based applications and the concomitant inability of legacy application performance management frameworks to understand how the dynamic quality of cloud infrastructures variously impacts cloud application performance. Separate from its experience with cloud infrastructure monitoring, Datadog brings rich data visualization capabilities to the conversation about application performance management in addition to battle-tested analytics that take advantage of time-series analyses, correlative analytics and predictive analytics as illustrated below:
With $94.5M in Series D funding raised in January, and a whopping $148M in total funding raised to date, expect Datadog to richly build out its application performance management capabilities in conjunction with the progressive expansion of the adoption of its cloud monitoring platform. Meanwhile, Datadog’s release of its application performance management solution signals the intensification of a larger battle in the industry to build and refine a comprehensive infrastructure and application monitoring framework capable of managing the radical heterogeneity of infrastructures, applications, databases and orchestration frameworks specific to contemporary computing.
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