Raygun Unveils Application Performance Monitoring Platform -

Two decades ago it would have been hard to imagine that even pizza delivery companies would need to create their own software platforms. However, today's businesses are now largely software-driven. We interact with so many different types of software on a daily basis, we don't even realize we are using software until a problem occurs.

Meanwhile, users in today's environment have an extremely low tolerance for errors. We expect everything to work perfectly whenever we need it.

For those reasons, software developers need to be extremely diligent about finding and removing bugs in their systems, and prevent problems before they happen. When errors do occur, developers need to be notified right away, and they need to take care of the issue as soon as possible.

Amid those needs, developers are embracing application performance monitoring (APM) to ensure user good experiences. Now, Raygun wants to assist that effort.

Raygun Extends to APM

Raygun already offers a platform that monitors errors and crashes for software teams, Key adopters include Domino’s Pizza, Coca-Cola, Nordstrom and Microsoft. Next up, the company has announced a new Application Performance Monitoring & Management service called Raygun APM.

With this new release, the Raygun Platform should offer one centralized tool to detect, diagnose and resolve errors and performance problems no matter where they occur or what the cause.

Raygun claims customers of their platform will be able to:

Gain real-time visibility into crashes and performance issues with friendly data visualization and UI;
View page-by-page user journeys and business-critical transactions within a single platform;
Dramatically reduce the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) of performance issues and software errors;
Trace key business transactions based on production application behavior;
Set up custom alerts, so that team members only get alerted when thresholds or baselines are exceeded;
Integrate Raygun with over 30 of the most popular third-party workflow tools including Slack, Jira, GitHub, and PagerDuty;
Understand and drill down into the root-cause of any application issue immediately, including the exact line of code, function, database or API call that cause issues;
Diagnose, replicate and resolve errors and performance issues faster with full contextual information;
Get actionable insights, not just charts, by curating a list of the most urgent issues to monitor and resolve;
Deliver exceptional experiences to VIPs by understanding and improving how the most important customers are experiencing an application with the full stack performance data from their every session;
Enjoy innovative pricing meaning the delivery of cost-effective APM across the whole stack, and works well with microservices or monolithic architectures;
Understand and compare the impact of deployments on key metrics such as changes to the Apdex scores, new errors introduced, regressed errors, impact on performance and more.

At launch, Raygun APM will be tightly integrated with GitHub and will automatically link diagnostic details that are captured and bring the information into the source code within your GitHub repository. With the integration, developers can inspect the code that is causing the problems, and take action without the need to switch back and forth between utilities.

All a developer needs to do is inspect the code causing the issue and take the appropriate action, with all the relevant information served to them, without having to switch between tools.

Describing the new APM capabilities, Raygun CEO John-Daniel Trask said in a prepared statement:

“The addition of APM to the Raygun Platform delivers on our vision of a totally integrated monitoring solution. We want to provide the data on crashes, real user performance and server monitoring all in one place, not siloed. We’ve been building towards the most integrated monitoring platform for years, re-thinking what can be achieved to support all modern solution architectures.”

Currently, Raygun APM is in beta testing for selected users. To get on the waitlist and gain access to Raygun APM at the earliest opportunity fill out the request form here. Pricing will be announced in the coming weeks.

No doubt, APM is a growing market -- but the competition is intense. In addition to entrenched rivals like BMC, CA Technologies and Dynatrace, fast-growth players like Cisco's AppDynamics, Datadog and New Relic also have momentum in theAPM sector.

Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.