AppDynamics 3.3 is only days away now (scheduled for release August 9^th) and AP have had a sneak peak at the features which are coming.

Top of the list is the long awaited support for .NET applications.

Version 3.3 brings to .NET developers and operations guys exactly the same capabilities that their Java counterparts have enjoyed for the last 3 years with AppDynamics. That is:

• Auto-discovery of Business transactions
• Auto-discovery of Transaction Flows - track business transactions across multiple tiers
• Auto-discovery of backends such as relational databases, NoSQL databases, Message Queues or Web services.
• 3 Clicks to root cause

.NET and Java have many things in common. Swap CLR for JVM, ASP.NET for Servlet and ADO.NET for JDBC and you soon see how similar they really are. Given these similarities what AppDynamics have created is not a whole new product but simply a new Agent which understands .NET. The core product is still the same with its strength in managing Agile, Distributed & Cloud applications and the same 'Secret Sauce' of Dynamic Flow Mapping^TM and Deep On-Demand Diagnostics^TM.

AppDynamics 3.3 has out of the box support for.NET 2.0 and above running on any Window 32 or 64-bit OS. It can support IIS applications, Desktop applications or Windows Services which run within a .NET CLR. Transaction flows can be traced across WCF, MSMQ, SOAP or HTTP calls into another .NET CLR or even into a Java JVM should you be running in a heterogeneous environment.

The free Lite product will be also upgraded to add .NET support and this should be available in early September.

Although .NET is obviously the big addition in 3.3 Java users are not left out and there is plenty for them to get excited about too. The biggest area of change is around JMX and MBean collection. Previously these could be viewed in the Metric Browser but now a JMX Console similar to JConsole has been added which allows full JMX browsing and short term trending of your selected metrics. This can be very useful when diagnosing an issue where you need to see metrics sampled and charted every second to watch for short duration spikes which wouldn’t be obvious on a 1 minute aggregated chart. Of course if you’d like to collect any metric long term they can be promoted to the metric browser with a single click.

Other enhancements of note include:

• Expanded hardware support for the Machine Agent via the inclusion of Sigar.
• Out of the box discovery for additional backend such as SAP, JavaMail, LDAP and MongoDB in addition to the Coherence, Memcached, EhCache and Cassandra which were added in the 3.2 release.
• Easier email configuration with Test Email button and ability to use a local SMPT mail relay without authentication
• Cloud Analytics which allows metrics to be correlated such as Load vs CPU or Response time vs Load.
• Search for snapshots based on HTTP request data.
• Agent management for z/OS