Monitoring must anchor on constant business transactions, not changing technical architectures.
Bhaskar S. · He launched a free product for enterprise customers—then grew to $12M ARR in 2 years. | Bhaskar S... · PMF Show · Mar 30, 2026 · at 4:23
Bhaskar Sunkara, co-founder of AppDynamics, explains the foundational thesis behind rethinking application performance monitoring.
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“You need a unit of monitoring. You need to approach monitoring in a little bit of a different way where it represents something that is constant. So take Amazon, right? Like, let's just say take Amazon to a 15 year journey. And, you know, when they started off, let's say they had some architecture, they're measuring that, they're measuring some database queries and stuff like that. Take that forward 15 years, you know, the whole architecture will be completely different. The application will be completely different. But what is consistent is people are logging in, people are adding items to cart, people are checking out, right? So that's where we came up with this unit of monitoring called Business Transactions, and that really gave it like this anchor on, you know, with the change, with the architecture, it basically is like a very, very manageable unit, and that was kind of really like the core thesis.”
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