The ExtraHop system offers considerable advantages compared to other application performance management (APM) products, including Compuware Gomez (formerly Vantage), HP Real User Monitor (RUM), CA Wily Introscope, Quest Foglight, BMC Coradiant (now BMC End User Experience Management), and Tealeaf CX.
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| Real-Time Visibility* | |||||||||
| Network L2-L4 Metrics |
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| Network L7 Metrics |
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| Simple TCP Metrics |
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| Advanced TCP Metrics |
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| Detailed HTTP Transactions & Errors |
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| Database Transactions & Errors |
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| Alerts on L2-L4 Metrics |
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| Alerts on L7 Metrics |
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| 10 Gbps Throughput |
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| No Agents | |
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| No Configuration | |
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| 15-Minute Deployment |
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How the ExtraHop System Compares to Traditional Application Performance Management (APM) Products
Application performance management (APM) is the IT management discipline focused on ensuring the optimal performance of applications from a business and end-user standpoint. Comprehensive APM solutions measure and monitor performance as well as help to troubleshoot and remediate issues before they impact the business or end-user experience.
Monitoring Complex, Dynamic Applications
Traditional APM tools such as Compuware Gomez (formerly Vantage), HP Real User Monitor (RUM), CA Wily Introscope, and Quest Foglight all rely on software agents distributed throughout the application infrastructure to gather performance information. These agent-based approaches can yield valuable and detailed application performance data and are appropriate for test and development environments or static datacenter deployments where applications seldom change.
However, agent-based APM products increasingly encounter problems in enterprise production environments because they can take months to deploy and need to be recertified, reconfigured, and redeployed when the application code or IT environment changes. Moreover, agents consume system resources and introduce additional network traffic as they send information back to the reporting server. Agents can disrupt the applications they are monitoring and need to be checked frequently to ensure that they are functioning properly. Most agent-based products are not designed for virtual environments and must approximate timing measurements to compensate for clock skew inside these environments.
The ExtraHop system takes a passive, network-based approach to APM that avoids problems associated with agents. With a level of analysis only recently made possible by gains in processing speed and storage capacity, the ExtraHop system reconstructs transactions from production network traffic and then performs real-time analysis to extract health and performance metrics from L2 through L7. The ExtraHop system does not rely on periodic synthetic transactions to monitor application health. Instead, the system examines real user traffic and provides an exhaustive analysis of every transaction, including extensive application-level details such as specific errors and the methods used.
Deployment and Configuration
In contrast to agent-based APM products, the ExtraHop system is extremely simple to deploy and maintain. As a self-contained appliance, the system can be deployed and begin analyzing application transactions in under an hour. The ExtraHop system requires no pre-configuration and automatically discovers network devices and their dependencies based on a heuristic analysis of network traffic. This auto-discovery capability enables the ExtraHop application performance management (APM) solution to continuously monitor application performance regardless of changes in application code or the IT environment.
With an agentless approach to APM, the ExtraHop system consumes no system resources or network bandwidth and does not perturb the environment. With passive monitoring, IT organizations no longer have to worry about hindering the performance of production systems to gain insight into persistent problems. Through purely passive analysis, the ExtraHop system provides a comprehensive, real-time view into the performance of all tiers of the application infrastructure, including load balancers, web servers, application servers, databases, and networked storage systems. Read more about how the ExtraHop system works and how the ExtraHop system compares to traditional network performance management (NPM) tools.
How the ExtraHop System Compares to User Experience Monitoring (UEM) Products
User experience monitoring (UEM), sometimes called real user monitoring (RUM), is a relatively recent segment of APM that provides an outside-looking-in view of application performance. Focused on the web tier of applications, UEM tools analyze HTTP transactions to track how users interact with web applications.
Correlating Frontend and Backend Activity
UEM products from Coradiant (acquired by BMC in February 2011 and now called BMC End User Experience Management) and Tealeaf use network appliances to capture and analyze traffic to and from web servers. These tools enable marketing teams to replay user paths and determine the impact of poor application performance, including which pages caused an issue, which users were affected, and which geographic areas were impacted.
The ExtraHop system monitors end-user experiences with in-depth HTTP analysis and goes further to help IT operations teams quickly pinpoint the root cause of performance problems within the application infrastructure. In addition to monitoring the web tier, the ExtraHop system correlates end-user experiences with performance metrics from the network, load-balancer, database, and storage tiers of the application. For service providers or internal IT organizations with strict service-level agreements (SLAs), this comprehensive view of the application infrastructure helps to eliminate or minimize SLA violations.
Scalability
UEM products claim to monitor real user transactions but often resort to a sampled mode of operation when faced with heavy loads. Designed to handle the most demanding workloads, the ExtraHop system can analyze hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with up to a sustained 10Gbps of throughput. This level of scalability is crucial for software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, ecommerce companies, or other businesses that need to accommodate rapidly growing demand.
ExtraHop Networks partners with Keynote Systems, a provider of on-demand test and measurement products for mobile communications and Internet performance, to provide an end-to-end APM solution for enterprise web applications. The joint ExtraHop and Keynote solution combines outside-looking-in and inside-looking-out views so that Web Operations teams have a complete picture of how their business-critical web applications are running.
*Real-Time Visibility means (1) always-on (no configuration), (2) analyzing all transactions (no sampling), and (3) deep transaction details (e.g. URIs for HTTP, full SQL statements for database, file names for storage).