Introducing App 360: Your Observability-Centric, Cost-Effective APM Alternative

Years before founding Logz.io, I was a software engineer, working with various tools to ensure my products and services performed correctly. There were few tools I dreaded using more than application performance management (APM), and I know that I’m not alone.

I hated traditional APM. It’s heavy. It’s hard to implement. It’s expensive. It takes a very long time to derive business value. Today, it’s clear that it doesn’t play well with ubiquitous modern practices including Kubernetes and artificial intelligence. 

APM is also highly intrusive to your overall tech stack. When you implement an APM from one of today’s popular software vendors, it forces you to instrument its hooks all over your code. This practice has a detrimental impact on your business and could take years to rip out if you ever decide that you want to move on. You’re locked-in.

At Logz.io, we’ve endeavored to create something radically different. We didn’t want to build another APM—we wanted a high-performing alternative to what other vendors offer. It’s a true observability approach born in the Kubernetes and AI era; delivering all of the required capabilities in a manner that’s far less disruptive and costly.

It’s called App 360, the newest addition to the Logz.io Open 360™ observability platform. It’s a more universal approach to applications observability than APM, focused on harnessing the power of OpenTelemetry and open source, and democratizing access to telemetry data to provide maximum value.

With App 360, you’re getting a cost-effective, easy-to-implement alternative. It’s tailor-made for microservices, Kubernetes and a rapidly-changing observability environment. App 360 provides all the functionality needed for core APM use-cases and full visibility into the health and performance of your applications, without all the costly headaches.

Why We Created App 360

Contemporary systems are constructed using numerous distinct, fleeting, and interconnected cloud elements, posing a significant challenge for engineers — those required to understand the current status of their applications, identify customer-impacting issues, and grasp the reasons behind these problems. 

Observability aims to assist engineers in swiftly addressing queries regarding the current condition of their systems to expedite issue resolution, such as determining the cause of a sudden latency increase in a service, or understanding the reason behind a sudden drop in checkouts.

Nevertheless, observability itself can be intricate and come with a hefty complexity and price tags. Implementing application observability involves instrumenting services to generate telemetry data, configuring a backend to store and process this data, constructing application monitoring dashboards, and undertaking many other necessary steps. Once fully operational, the process can result in substantial expenses, often incurred from vendors like Datadog or New Relic.

Instead of taking your apps and instrumenting them to work with an APM, App 360 is about taking an observability-based approach. It’s a centralized interface for visualizing and investigating applications performance, allowing you to tie logs, metrics and traces from applications, infrastructure and Kubernetes into one picture. You’ll see the right signals and correlate all the relevant information so you can truly understand your environment, from the lastest code delivered to the pod networking state.

The App 360 approach also allows for a 360-degree view of the ongoing changes to your applications and infrastructure, across all relevant stakeholders. This new approach can help your organization avoid siloed telemetry and complex tooling. It’ll also ease the spiraling costs that constantly plague APM users.

Our customers can quickly achieve full application observability so they can answer difficult questions about the current state of their environments—at a fraction of the cost of other platforms.

How App 360 Fits in the Larger Observability Picture

Over the course of the last year, we’ve worked on providing our customers with unparalleled visibility into their environments. Our customers use Kubernetes 360 to get a full view into their Kubernetes environments. We’ve made it incredibly simple to instrument apps through Easy Connect, delivered application insights in a consolidated view with Service Overview, and delivered massively flexible and cost-effective observability data storage with Cold Tier.

App 360 is the natural evolution of this strategy to provide a uniquely simple, cost-effective observability value for our customers.

Going back to my days as a software engineer, I would’ve been so excited to get APM capabilities through a modern, observability-centric technology that doesn’t take forever to implement—something where I could drop the agent and everything would work by itself.

That’s what we believe customers will get out of App 360.

For a more technical deep-dive into how App 360 works, you can read our “how to” blog here.

If you’d like to see App 360 and the rest of the Logz.io Open 360 observability platform in action yourself, sign up for a free trial today.