I received a rather nice email last night from one of our customers Fox News:

Hey Appman – we just had a KICK ASS night with elections coverage, and just so you’d know, we had AppDynamics to monitor our site and it helped us avoid a number of pitfalls…

Just thought you’d like to know.

Here is what our contact at Fox News told us, showing us how AppDynamics was used to proactively manage the performance and availability of their flagship media website:

“This first screen shot shows you the whole day, providing a request histogram view of application throughput SLA (vertical bars) and performance (blue line).”

“Around 4PM, we started having issues as shown by the blue line spikes (shown above), and then I looked around.

One of the things I found was that a feed (HTTP call) we were pulling from our video site was timing out.”

“That was also evident via another call through our API.“

“As if that wasn’t enough, we found out that we had business transactions calling back to http://pipes.yahoo.com, which we weren’t even supposed to be using. A developer told me that it was in the old version, not in the new one. But after showing him it in AppDynamics, they removed it (that helped quite a bit).”

“If you notice as well with the graphs from 7-11PM onwards, response time began to increase, so we kept an eye on the servers and started to see an increase in our error rate.”

“One thing we did notice was that the tomcats were throwing an error exception “not enough space left on device,” which we traced to the system running out of inodes. To fix that we had to end up deleting some old cache files, and after that the error mostly went away.”

“It was a wild night for sure, but AppDynamics helped us keep things in check!”

If you want to try AppDynamics, you can download our free version AppDynamics Lite or take a free 30-day trial of AppDynamics Pro.

Appman.