Free .NET Performance Monitoring Solution released by AppDynamics

AppDynamics announces AppDynamics Lite for .NET, its new application performance management (APM) solution for .NET applications. The software is free.

The application performance management (APM) market continues to heat up as AppDynamics, a provider of APM software, announced the release of AppDynamics Lite for .NET.

AppDynamics officials called the new offering a production-ready performance monitoring tool for Microsoft’s .NET framework. The company expanded the scope of AppDynamics Lite, which has been available for the Java platform with more than 70,000 users.

AppDynamics Lite for .NET is free. The .NET monitoring product enables IT staffs to quickly troubleshoot and diagnose performance problems in production. AppDynamics Lite installs in less than 90 seconds, identifies and monitors an application's business transactions, and gives insight into common application issues such as slow SQL, stalls, errors and slow response time, the company said. The software comes with code-level diagnostics as well as trending and alerting capabilities.

"The success of AppDynamics Lite so far clearly demonstrates that IT pros need a free monitoring solution for their production applications," says Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics, in a statement. "They need far more than simple system monitoring tools like Perfmon. AppDynamics Lite is exactly what app support teams require – a production monitoring tool solution that provides insight deep into the application layer."

"The fact that AppDynamics is offering this download for free is borderline crazy," said Nick Koning, technical architect at Best Practice, in a statement. "We've used it to monitor a single Microsoft IIS Web Server, and we've been blown away by how easy it is to use a business transaction approach to production monitoring and gain code-level diagnostics in seconds. None of us here have any doubt that this is a game-change for .NET developer and operations teams."

AppDynamics Lite is installed directly on an instance of IIS. The product enables IT staffs to drill down into slow requests as well as gain a high-level overview of how their application performs over time. Moreover, AppDynamics Lite for .NET provides a simple approach to monitoring ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications, the company said.

AppDynamics' introduction of its new .NET solution comes only weeks after Compuware made a big splash with its Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release, which introduced a new generation of APM for the company with innovations across its dynaTrace and Gomez product brands that help customers optimize the performance and value of their business-critical applications. This new release represents the next phase in Compuware's unified APM strategy. It is the first release of the new Compuware APM brand with Gomez and dynaTrace as major sub-brands within it.