With the holiday decorations packed away and a new year upon us, we can’t help but reflect on 2011. At ExtraHop, we had a fantastic year filled with many milestones as we continued to revolutionize the application performance management (APM) market.
By ExtraHop Networks CEO Jesse Rothstein
When Raja Mukerji and I founded ExtraHop Networks in 2007, we had a vision for a powerful and elegant approach to application performance management (APM). We realized that legacy APM tools had become untenable due to exponential increases in IT complexity. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system was based on the premise that the health and performance information needed to manage business-critical applications is available on the wire. Previously, this valuable information was discarded, and due to gains in processing power and storage capacity, we were able to engineer an innovative solution that enabled a truly application-aware, network-based approach to APM.
Read more on It’s Time to Rethink Application Performance Management…
I love statistics—who doesn’t? Stats are a great way to identify important trends, behaviors, and market challenges—which is precisely why a recent infographic published on ReadWriteWeb about data storage grabbed my attention.
This week saw the release of the Gartner 2011 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring* (APM). In February 2010, Gartner issued its first Magic Quadrant for the APM industry in which it placed 19 vendors in its famous (or perhaps infamous) Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players quadrants based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. In addition, Gartner introduced five dimensions of functionality that are required for any comprehensive APM offering. The first four dimensions monitor end-to-end application performance, while the last dimension provides real-time and historic correlation and analysis of that data. In the latest 2011 Magic Quadrant, Gartner devotes 9 out of 40 pages to describing the five functional dimensions.
While it’s true that application performance monitoring (APM) is only as good as its weakest link, conventional wisdom, as advocated by legacy application performance management vendors, suggests a "more is better" philosophy. Add more agents, collect more packets, run more synthetic transactions. In our discussions with customers, we’ve found that this quest to keep bolting on more and more monitoring solutions to more and more elements within the datacenter often results in a monitoring infrastructure that is more complicated than the applications themselves! This burden imposed by legacy monitoring solutions leads to incredible inefficiency and excessive cost.
Read more on More is Not Always Better for Application Performance Monitoring (APM)…
