Appnomic is the first self-healing software for IT operations that fixes problems before they happen

Appnomic’s founder, Paddy Padmanabhan, started the company using his knowledge of architecting a core banking solution and battling performance issues plaguing client applications with high transaction volumes. In most cases, the performance issues were not code related. Finding the root cause was a cumbersome task, involving elimination or seeking the cause and effect relationship between overall usage load and system behavior.  On the lookout for a way to quickly solve the problem and provide a lasting solution, he found that he could potentially replicate the actions and decision-making criteria into a learning system taking cognitive actions, preventing problems from occurring. These were the origins of Appnomic leading to the development of the industry’s first AI implementation in Application Performance and self-healing abilities.

Appnomic is the creator of self-healing solutions. HEAL is a software that studies your business’ IT systems with the support of AI, predictive anomaly detection, anomaly linked healing triggers and unified causation, which helps in coping and avert routine system failures before it even occurs.

HEAL aids in effortless operations and helps you focus your time, energy and money into other operations of your business.

To better understand the company, Nitin Kumar, CEO, spoke more about Appnomic in an interview with CIO Bulletin.

What are your renowned products/services?

With a grand vision for the future, we developed HEAL – a software using AI to study your business’ IT systems and, through predictive anomaly detection, anomaly linked healing triggers and unified causation, manages to detect and prevent routine system failures or performance degradation before it happens.

Removing or reducing the need for outsourcing IT operations specialists and employing additional solutions, HEAL makes operations run smoother and allows companies to focus their time, energy, manpower and money into other aspects of business.

Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons that have shaped the journey of your company.

In initial years, our primary challenge was staying focused on what matters most, and not sacrifice long term value creation by short term quick wins. Every software company has the resource challenges; creating features that customers request vs. staying on an innovation trajectory for building the product of the future. We tried to balance both, we treated every feature request as an opportunity to understand the business problems and create a solution. If we took every feature request, we would probably become like one of the many other monitoring tools, instead of creating a product that defines a new category. Today, the challenge is the messaging in the market which is very cluttered with a lot of companies positioning themselves as AI Ops with very similar messaging, even though many of them only address AI Ops partially. Our complete strategic pivot to self-healing will bring in clarity to our customers

Considering the number of your competitors, how are you exceptional?

Our product is unique, when it comes to the self-healing capabilities for the enterprise; we are the only game in town at any scale. We have multiple patents enabling self-healing, transaction shaping, and other techniques which optimize capacity, service levels, costs and enhance performance. We operate with integrity and have delivered the promise of our product, taking it to the next level with each new release.

What is your organization’s rule of thumb?

Customers buy based on trust, credibility and product promise which is why we have ingrained what we preach into our culture and operate the same way with customers, partners, investors and employees. Staying focused on our customers’ success, staying close to their business and maintaining a product roadmap addressing our customers’ challenges is key. Delivering products creating value is our simple and humble recipe towards earning trust, respect and credibility.

In this ever-increasing market competition, what do you think, is your company a leader or a follower? Where does your company envision itself in the long run?

Appnomic is the leader in its industry. With HEAL, a self-healing solution that predicts and prevents rather than just fix what’s broken, our clients can benefit from this new age IT tool that uses AI algorithms and machine learning models to help enterprises run without a hitch. Using a patented technique called ‘workload-behavior correlation’, HEAL analyses all the aspects that go into the smooth running of an IT system (the cumulative volume, composition and payload), and reacts every time an abnormal behavior occurs, triggering either a healing action or a scaling action depending on the root cause of the problem.

Cite some of your company’s success stories.

CASE 1: Banking and Financial Services. Retail bank offering online and retail banking services more than $25billion assets

Challenges:

Failures in core banking system causing loss of revenue.

Monitoring and AIOps tools are ineffective in complex environment due to multiple silos (network, storage, app servers, web servers and databases). 

Appnomic Solution:

HEAL provides proactive self-healing by early warning signal detection on massive data volumes and at all levels of stack:

2500+ metrics

~10 million transaction data points

~500 components

The signal detected by HEAL:

HEAL detected signals from App Server, Database and Core Banking Application that corelated to each other.

• sql.SQLEXCEPTION in Websphere Application Server SystemOut logs; the same error was recorded in the database exit method of the app server’s business logic code
• Increase in Heap usage seen on all the JVMs
• Lock on Database due to CRM query (Forensics pointed to CRM query) – DB deep dive revealed that the bank had performed bulk customer update operations during that time which created the lock. At the same time, an Invalid Conversion requested error was observed in the logs, and DB Queries revealed an invalid parameter being passed for one of the queries

The corrective action taken:

Data showed that there was an application coding issue in the way the DB query parameters were being passed. Patch was deployed and issue was fixed.

The problem that was prevented:

Transaction failure and downtime averted

Outcome:

More than 10% lift in transactions, 50%+ reduction of developer time invested in fixing incidents

CASE 2: Banking and Financial Services. Largest lender with more than $150billion assets

Challenges:

Disruption in Online Banking services causing downtime, bad customer experience and loss of revenue.

Monitoring and AIOps tools are ineffective in complex environment due to multiple silos (network, storage, app servers, web servers and databases). 

Appnomic Solution:

HEAL provides preventive self-healing by eliminating issues that leads to failures.

HEAL does early warning signal detection on massive data volumes and at all levels of stack:

170,000 metrics

270 million transaction data points

180+ applications

1300+ hosts

13000 components

The signal detected by HEAL:

HEAL detected 3 signals that corelated to each other

• Current Connections on the WEB server (Normal Operating Range 500-800 during peak hours but increased to range of 4000-6000)
• DB Host CPU utilization was consistently hitting 100% at the same time. SQL process was consuming most of the CPU.
• On Database side, early warning signals were raised on number of deadlocks; DB deep dive revealed SQL queries which were taking high CPU & execution time.

The corrective action taken:

Non-performant queries were tuned

The problem that was prevented:

Transaction failure and downtime averted ahead of incident

Outcome:

More than 15% lift in transactions, 60%+ reduction of developer time invested in fixing incidents

“We’re an ambitious and innovative software company that loves difficult business technology problems.”

“HEAL makes operations run smoother and allow you to focus your time, energy and money into other aspects of your business.”