SEATTLE, WA — April 25, 2013 — ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of real-time IT operational intelligence solutions, today announced that Gartner has included it as a Cool Vendor in the Cool Vendors in Application Performance Monitoring, 2013^[1] report, authored by Gartner Research Vice President Will Cappelli and Gartner Research Director Jonah Kowall. According to Gartner, the report analyzes “emerging APM offerings bought by multiple buyers, including IT operations, application support, development and line-of-business application owners. These offerings encompass an understanding of network performance, the Internet’s health and critical mobile application performance.”

ExtraHop’s IT operational intelligence is a superset of application performance management (APM), network performance management (NPM), infrastructure performance management (IPM), business transaction management (BTM), and real-user management (RUM). It provides correlated visibility across tiers without the use of agents or other invasive instrumentation, all from a single appliance.

With a real-time view of the performance of all applications and infrastructure, IT Operations teams have the ability to answer the question, “What is happening in my environment right now?” Previously, when a technology problem occurred, IT organizations didn’t know where to start to look for its source. ExtraHop solves this problem by providing a holistic view of performance across all tiers, including the network, web, database, VDI, and storage tiers. Users can start with a high-level view of performance and then quickly drill down to granular device- and transaction-level details to pinpoint the root cause of a problem.

“IT teams can’t manage what they can’t measure. We are committed to providing IT organizations with visibility for all applications, all the time, in real time—even in highly dynamic environments,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO at ExtraHop Networks. “Our solution mines real-time wire data to auto-discover and auto-classify applications and servers. With this up-to-date view of application performance, IT Operations teams can move from a reactive state to one that is very proactive, helping to minimize downtime and free up resources to focus on innovation.”

To get started with ExtraHop, request a 60-day trial at http://www.extrahop.com/discovery.

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop provides the real-time operational intelligence required to make IT more agile and proactive. The world’s best-run IT organizations use ExtraHop to manage more than a half-million devices and monitor over a trillion transactions daily, including Adobe, Alaska Airlines, Concur, Expedia, and Microsoft. Winner of many innovation awards from Interop and others, the ExtraHop platform auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and systems out of the box, providing the correlated, real-time visibility essential for dynamic environments. The ExtraHop platform deploys without agents and delivers value in less than 15 minutes, making it the most cost-effective solution on the market. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop.

Press Contacts

Justin Baker

ExtraHop Networks

206-453-2290

pr@extrahop.com

Disclaimer:

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

In order to implement an end-to-end performance management system, organizations need to overcome both internal divisions between IT teams and the old school performance management and monitoring tools that aren’t designed to integrate and share data.”

– Aberdeen Group, “The Need for End-to-End Application Performance Management and Monitoring,” November 2012

End-to-end APM has entered the IT spotlight, as noted in the quote above from a new Aberdeen Group report. Specifically, this latest report finds that with the growth of mobile, cloud, virtualization, and agile development, companies must adopt new, end-to-end approaches to application performance management (APM). The report surveyed 211 IT organizations and found that those teams that take an end-to-end approach to APM realized a number of benefits:

• 43 percent less likely to see applications as too complex
• 22 percent less likely to have application infrastructures that didn’t support growth
• 36 percent less likely to lack the tools needed to resolve critical events
• 75 percent less likely to see overutilization of applications as a challenge

Download the Aberdeen Group report free before December 31, 2012.

Achieving End-to-End APM is Easy with ExtraHop

Clearly, it’s very important for businesses to adopt end-to-end approaches, and with the ExtraHop system, gaining operational intelligence for the entire application delivery chain doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Aberdeen’s report outlines four key goals that businesses must focus on to achieve end-to-end APM—all of which are addressed by the ExtraHop system.

1. View Network, Application, Infrastructure, and Transaction Performance Holistically

“If your performance management and monitoring tools are disconnected and unable to work together, it will lead to increased complexity and inability to troubleshoot critical issues.”

Unlike traditional APM approaches that rely on a combination of loosely integrated specialist tools, the ExtraHop system provides value to all IT groups. Practice Fusion’s VP of Technical Operations, John Hluboky, explains, “Every team in our IT organization uses the ExtraHop system. It’s our single pane of glass. Our system engineers and network engineers use it most often, but the application support team and DBAs also use the ExtraHop system to determine authentication failures or tune a database query, for example. This information is available immediately off the wire in terms that everyone can easily understand.” Read how Practice Fusion enables IT collaboration with ExtraHop.

2. Support Dynamic and Scalable Cloud-Based Environments

“Many traditional performance management and monitoring tools have a hard time monitoring and tracking performance issues when applications use virtualized or cloud-based systems.”

A recent article at Datamation highlights how the ExtraHop system helped Concur, a provider of travel and expense reporting solutions, optimize the performance of its IT environment, which is nearly 80 percent virtualized. Seeking greater scalability and speed, Concur used the ExtraHop system to analyze SQL query performance across thousands of databases to identify the best candidates for migration to memcache databases. The team also monitored memcache performance and correlated that performance to activity at other tiers of the application infrastructure. Drew Garner, Concur’s Director of Architecture Services, explains how ExtraHop helped to pinpoint problems that other monitoring tools could not identify:

“We had an abnormally high rate of HTTP aborts for a pool of 60 front-end webservers that host three different sites. We have so much traffic to this pool that it was extremely difficult to isolate the problem server using our user-experience monitoring tool. By customizing the analysis in the ExtraHop system, we could identify a server that was configured to debugging mode. We turned debugging off and immediately saw the HTTP aborts fall by 95 percent in ExtraHop.” Read how Concur optimized database performance with ExtraHop.

3. Reduce the Time Needed to Triage and Troubleshoot Application Performance Problems

“End-to-end performance management systems are able to both increase visibility into application problems and decrease the time needed to identify the root cause of an issue and repair it.”

Chris Grey, Alaska Airlines’ Director of IT Operations, says, “In many cases, ExtraHop can cut our troubleshooting time in half.” IT organizations using the ExtraHop system as the single source of truth can quickly correlate application behavior across the network, web, database, and storage tiers to understand what is happening. Read how Alaska Airlines used ExtraHop to reduce troubleshooting times.

4. Provide Insight to Business Stakeholders for SLA Management and IT Business Intelligence

“End-to-end performance management … means ensuring that all of the key stakeholders in a business can view and understand performance data in order to ensure that applications continue to perform at their highest capabilities.”

The ExtraHop system offers contextual visualization capabilities, including summary performance dashboards, that companies can customize to provide intelligence to business stakeholders. A large, international investment institution uses ExtraHop’s dynamic geomaps in its network operations center (NOC) to show real-time application usage and potential trouble spots around the world. When the marketing team saw the geomaps in action, they gained new insight into how customers actually use their services.

Flex grids provide summary views of key performance indicators and performance-based SLA thresholds.

Geomaps in the ExtraHop system provide geographic context for real-time performance metrics and alerts.

To learn more, download the new Aberdeen Group report, “The Need for End-to-End Application Performance Management and Monitoring.”

To see how the ExtraHop system can work in your environment to provide end-to-end APM visibility and operational intelligence, download the ExtraHop Discovery Edition for a 60-day free trial.

The new Splunk App for ExtraHop captures real-time metrics that are otherwise difficult or impossible to log.

Splunk has made headlines over the past few months for its successful IPO and powerful Big Data approach to log file analysis. IT Operations teams all over the world use Splunk Enterprise software to free them from the drudgery of having to manually inspect server logs. With Splunk’s solution, these IT Operations teams can more easily manage, visualize, and analyze massive amounts of machine data generated in their datacenter.

Operational intelligence from Splunk complements the real-time application performance monitoring from ExtraHop. Both ExtraHop and Splunk represent new and better ways of solving difficult challenges. That’s why Gartner listed both companies in their December 2011 APM Innovators report.

Read more about the importance of innovation when choosing an application performance management (APM) solution.

Adding Policy-Based and Precision Logging to Big Data Operational Intelligence

Many thought-leading ExtraHop customers, such as Concur Technologies, use ExtraHop and Splunk in conjunction. In these scenarios, the ExtraHop system provides proactive early warning and cross-tier correlation for monitoring and troubleshooting application performance issues, while Splunk provides the historical analysis, trending, and reporting for the infrastructure.

Following the suggestions of our joint customers, ExtraHop and Splunk collaborated to integrate our products. The new Splunk App for ExtraHop enables IT teams to record important real-time information and metrics in Splunk that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to log.

• Network health and performance metrics. IT teams can use the ExtraHop system to capture holistic TCP metrics—spanning both the applications and network—that are timely and relevant for real-time troubleshooting. Without this precision logging, Splunk users are dependent on the quality and scale of logging provided by network device vendors.
• Web servers. With the ExtraHop system, IT teams gain visibility into HTTP/S payloads without having to change the application code and can correlate web tier performance with network behaviors. Application payload information cannot be logged, and only ExtraHop can extract elements like Order ID, Merchant ID, Title, and Transaction ID and forward that on to Splunk with no performance impact. This approach also provides visibility into related infrastructure components, such as application delivery controllers and caches that can obscure web server performance.
• Application servers. The ExtraHop system helps IT teams avoid problems with inconsistent and inflexible logging options available on application servers including Apache Tomcat, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. Obtaining the right log data normally requires scripted inputs using JMS/JMX. In contrast, ExtraHop sends precise application server metrics, as well as payload information, to Splunk that take network performance into account as well.
• Database servers. The ExtraHop system deploys non-intrusively and imposes zero overhead. In contrast, turning on database profiling to obtain log data adds too much overhead for that method to be used in production. Running an SQL trace added 19% and 147% overhead for two example workloads, respectively, according to an MSDN paper on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 auditing.

Depending on the workload, running an SQL trace to gather database server log data can add significant overhead.

• Storage devices. With the ExtraHop system, IT teams gain access to real-time storage performance metrics, including details that are difficult or impossible to derive from logs or storage APIs, such as file access times for specific clients.
• Transaction metrics. Perhaps most importantly, the ExtraHop system correlates health and performance metrics from discrete components in the application delivery chain to determine end-to-end response times, cross-tier metrics, and end-user metrics.

The ExtraHop system correlates performance metrics from throughout the application delivery chain to provide application response time metrics.

The Splunk App for ExtraHop is now available for download from Splunkbase. The 3-minute video below demonstrates how the integration between ExtraHop and Splunk works. If you use Splunk Enterprise in your environment and would like to add real-time application performance monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities, contact us today. Or, download the ExtraHop Discovery Edition, a free 60-day trial version of our solution.

At ExtraHop Networks, we’re doing our part to speed the development of the industry both in terms of functionality and pricing. This month, we announced subscription-based pricing for the EH1000v, the fastest virtual appliance for network-based APM, capable of handling up to 1Gbps of traffic. The subscription-based pricing starts at $8,148 for the base system with Premium Support in North America, which supports to 50 hosts or virtual machines (VMs) for one year. Adding a Microsoft SQL Server database module and NAS module brings the total price to $13,644 for complete visibility across the network, web, database, and storage tiers of the application environment.

For comparison, consider that contemporary agent-based APM tools often charge $2,000 per Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for a two-year license. Amortized over two years, the annual cost of that agent-based deployment for 50 hosts or VMs would come to $50,000—or $100,000 paid in the first year. And that’s for a product that offers limited visibility into critical network services like DNS and LDAP, and no visibility into networked storage performance! Read a more detailed APM cost comparison.

Low Cost of Entry for APM

Subscription-based pricing significantly lowers the cost of entry for enterprise-grade APM capabilities. IT organizations spend dramatically less upfront—as little as $7,428 for 50 servers or VMs. This lowers the risk for companies that are exploring application performance monitoring. Additionally, the monthly cost per host or VM comes to roughly $13, making it one of the most cost-effective ways to continuously monitor cross-tier application performance in real time.

Easy to Add Capacity

A subscription-based pricing model also makes it easy for IT organizations to scale their APM deployment as needed. Expanding coverage to another 50 devices simply requires teams to download another virtual appliance and spin up a new VM. The EH1000v connects to the vSwitch in a VMware cluster and does not require any agents, probes, or other invasive host-based instrumentation.

Industry-Leading Functionality and Benefits

While subscription-based pricing makes the ExtraHop system easier to deploy, it has always been one of the best APM solutions in the industry based on the effectiveness of dollars spent.

• Comprehensive visibility across tiers. No other APM solution offers the same real-time, L2-L7 visibility as the ExtraHop system. Having correlated visibility across the network, web, VDI, database, and storage tiers is crucial in identifying the root cause of problems quickly no matter where they occur in the application delivery chain.
• Non-intrusive deployment. Unlike other legacy APM tools that rely on agents, probes, and other invasive instrumentation, the ExtraHop system does not add any system overhead and will never perturb applications.
• Sustained 10Gbps throughput. In our discussions with prospective customers, we’ve encountered healthy skepticism about technical capabilities. “If you can do half of what you claim, then I’m interested” is what one IT director said. This skepticism is brought on by false and excessive vendor claims. In particular, competitors make scalability claims that may have been true in the pristine lab environment, but just don’t hold up in deployment. The ExtraHop system truly scales to 10Gbps analysis at sustained rates, not just in bursts. Read more about how the ExtraHop system accommodates real-world traffic patterns and packet loss.
• Customized metrics. Agent-based APM tools can be configured to do interesting things, but these adjustments often require special expertise and can be difficult to maintain as the application changes. In contrast, Application Inspection Triggers enable IT teams to define and implement custom metrics within minutes. How IT teams use this technology is limited only by imagination, but one favorite use is for “spot and trace” transaction analysis across tiers where the ExtraHop system passively tracks unique identifiers such as session IDs across the application delivery chain.
• Automatic discovery and classification. The status quo in the APM industry is long and complicated deployments requiring outside consultants to set things up. In contrast, the ExtraHop system is truly plug-and-play and begins analyzing traffic immediately upon installation to discover and classify devices and applications within minutes.

These are just a few of the industry-leading features in the ExtraHop system. More features are coming (very soon!), so stay tuned by subscribing to our RSS feed or following us on Twitter and on LinkedIn. In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it already, watch the video below where Customer Support Director Kurt Shubert and Support Engineer Jason Epstein demonstrate how the ExtraHop system can be deployed in just 10 minutes.

Despite our categorization as an APM Innovator in Gartner’s December 2011 report, “APM Innovators: Driving APM Technology and Delivery Evolution,” the requirement for code instrumentation makes ExtraHop Networks ineligible for inclusion in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM because we don’t use agents or probes. And while ExtraHop values market research from Gartner, especially the high-profile coverage of the Magic Quadrant report, we would not ask our customers to install software agents on application servers. That’s because doing so would violate several of the core tenets of what we believe should characterize next-generation application performance monitoring or Agile APM.

Working from an IT Operations-Centric Definition of “Application”

The disparity between ExtraHop’s view of application performance monitoring and the industry status quo is due to the definition of application:

• Gartner defines an application as a set of software algorithms, reflecting the heritage of the Magic Quadrant for APM. Prior to 2012, many of the same agent-based APM vendors that show up today in the Magic Quadrant for APM were evaluated in the Magic Quadrant for J2EE Application Server Management. Agent-based products provide valuable insight into the performance of application or business logic, especially in pre-production and QA. These capabilities are what lie behind the traditional view of application performance management.
• ExtraHop’s definition of an application is more than just the software code or application logic—it is the entire application delivery chain, application system, or application environment comprising the network, web, middleware, database, and storage tiers, as well as ancillary network-bound services such as directory services and DNS. We believe this second definition more accurately fits the outlook of IT Operations teams responsible for the availability, responsiveness, and efficiency of numerous applications in production environments.

Based on this IT Operations-centric definition of an application, ExtraHop built an elegant new network-based APM solution that uses a top-down approach to application monitoring and is more suited to handle growing complexity and scale in application environments. The ExtraHop system enables IT Operations team to “see IT run” with real-time, adaptive, and transaction-level analysis into the performance of all the tiers of the all applications in production. The ExtraHop system also provides value in preproduction and QA situations, as shown in our Axstores case study, but where the solution really excels is in production. Importantly, this network-based approach enables IT organizations—for the first time—to effectively monitor all of their applications, all the time, in real time.

Tackling Cost and Complexity in APM

When applied to applications in production, the legacy approach to APM carries significant monetary and technical costs that only increase with growing IT complexity. The 2012 Magic Quadrant for APM alludes to the pitfalls of agents on page 26 of the where Gartner advises IT organizations to beware of the challenges associated with deploying APM technologies:

“Even if these premises are accepted in full, it is still not advisable to try to deploy all five dimensions of APM across the entire application portfolio. Given the cost and complexity of APM technologies, an enterprise should first focus on, at most, the top 10 most business-critical applications for those, concentrating initially on end-user experience monitoring. Once that is mastered, other dimensions may be taken up. Finally, once a state of familiarity with APM has been obtained, the enterprise can contemplate extending end-user experience monitoring and application performance analytics to the top 40 or 50 most business-critical applications. It is unlikely that further expansion, either in terms of functional dimension or portfolio coverage, will deliver a positive ROI.”

In other words, IT organizations that use agent-based APM tools will only be able to afford to fully monitor a small percentage of their application portfolio! With an elegant network-based deployment, the ExtraHop system turns this dour view on its head, enabling IT Operations teams to monitor and manage the performance of all the business-critical applications running in their environment. The ExtraHop system offers several unique advantages that facilitate fast, broad deployment of APM capabilities:

1. Simple deployment model. The ExtraHop system is an all-in-one network appliance with a simple deployment model that belies its extensive functionality (such as the customized analysis possible with Application Inspection Triggers). The ExtraHop system automatically discovers and classifies devices, delivering valuable transaction metrics within 15 minutes of installation and dynamically adjusting to changing application environments. In contrast, agent-based tools require careful configuration before they can be deployed in production, professional services for installation and maintenance, and additional hardware for management servers and databases.
2. Few organizational obstacles. While the passive, all-in-one ExtraHop system requires only a port mirror or network tap, installing agents on application servers requires IT teams to navigate organizational obstacles as the users of the APM tools may need to obtain permission of their colleagues, management, or third-parties who are responsible for running the infrastructure.
3. Non-intrusive data gathering. The ExtraHop system analyzes a copy of network traffic at wire speeds to extract real-time metrics and imposes no system overhead. Agents, on the other hand, impose system overhead and use invasive techniques that can threaten the stability of the applications they are supposed to monitor. While three percent CPU overhead may have been acceptable in the past when applications had dedicated physical infrastructure with relatively low utilization, now that applications increasingly run on virtualized infrastructure with utilization rates as high as 70 percent, this overhead carries serious potential consequences. In these situations, additional CPU load translates directly into higher server costs, as there is less headroom to absorb the additional load.
4. Broad application support. The ExtraHop system supports all applications that communicate over TCP/IP, including custom-developed applications. Unlike agent-based APM tools that provide Java and .NET instrumentation, the ExtraHop system monitors the performance of off-the-shelf, packaged applications that are critical to business operations, such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, SAP, and Oracle enterprise software.
5. Information suited to IT Operations. As noted earlier, deep-dive code diagnostics are very useful for development and QA, but require extensive configuration to provide the context that IT Operations teams need to solve problems quickly. Built specifically to monitor application performance in production environments, the top-down visibility available in the ExtraHop system is a much better starting point for IT Operations teams and provides valuable information for a wide range of personnel, not just the application team with intimate knowledge of the code.

IT Operations teams that need to extend APM capabilities to cover their entire application portfolio should take a look at the ExtraHop system. We’d love the opportunity to prove our claims in a proof-of-concept. If you take us up on this offer, expect a fast and easy deployment with none of the configuration hassles associated with other APM products. In addition, we’ll provide a free customized application performance assessment of business-critical applications in your environment. This is a $30,000 value, and something that other vendors will happily sell you for that price.

For further discussion of why most IT organizations only monitor approximately five percent of their application portfolio, we recommend this post from Bernd Harzog of The Virtualization Practice: Why Is Application Performance Management So Screwed Up?

For information on how ExtraHop measures up against Gartner’s five functional dimensions of APM, read our post, Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and the Five Functional Dimensions of APM.

*Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring, Will Cappelli, Jonah Kowall, August 16, 2012. The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2012 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This week’s post lays out one of ExtraHop’s answers to the application performance monitoring (APM) data overload problem. In talking with IT Operation teams, we heard a common complaint: other APM products were leaving them to try to correlate events by sifting through a flood of data. Our team at ExtraHop responded by building Application Inspection Triggers (AI Triggers) technology so IT Operations teams can tailor their performance monitoring and gather the precise data they need.

Need to isolate which specific web server is throwing out errors in a large pool? No problem, just create a trigger. Need to identify the best caching candidates by calculating the total weight of all the SQL queries hitting your database? Yep, you can do that with a trigger too. Need to segment your HTTP performance metrics by mobile OS, or even different versions of the same OS? …You get the idea.

ExtraHop’s Answer to APM Data Overload: Application Inspection Triggers

As a companion to its market insight report, TRAC Research also published a solution overview examining AI Triggers technology from ExtraHop, “Application Inspection Triggers: Providing the Right APM Data, to the Right People, at the Right Time.” Both reports are available for free with one registration on the ExtraHop Resources page.

Based on a survey of more than 400 IT organizations, the TRAC Research Solution Overview identified the top challenges that organizations face when monitoring transactions. The ExtraHop system with AI Triggers neatly solves the top challenges that survey respondents reported.

TRAC Research white papers on APM data usability.

Download the white papers (requires free registration).

Top Challenge #1 – Monitor transaction performance from the point of user interaction to where the transaction is processed

Seventy-one percent of respondents reported this issue as a top challenge when monitoring application transactions. Triggers enable organizations to recognize unique identifiers across tiers, such as embedded tags or session IDs inserted by JSP, PHP, and Microsoft ASP programming languages.

A common example is monitoring ecommerce transactions to determine latency at the network, web, and database tiers. One ExtraHop customer uses triggers to monitor ecommerce transactions in this way across as many as 11 hops. This noninvasive method of transaction tracing is referred to as “recognize and trace,” as opposed to the incredibly invasive and cumbersome “tag and trace” methods used by legacy business transaction management (BTM) vendors.

Top Challenge #2 – Management overhead

Sixty-four percent of respondents said that management overhead was a top challenge for monitoring application transactions. One of the key benefits of ExtraHop’s approach for monitoring network and application performance is the fact that the company provides deep visibility into application performance without using any monitoring agents.

This noninvasive, network-based approach enables customers to address key monitoring challenges without having to install, configure, and test monitoring agents that tax system resources and can perturb applications. Customers are using the same passive approach when leveraging triggers, as no monitoring agents are required to gain deep, customized visibility into network and application performance.

Top Challenge #3 – Monitor transaction performance without modifying application code

Forty-one percent of organizations responded that the ability to monitor transactions without modifying their application code was a top challenge. AI Triggers technology addresses this concern by enabling organizations to make all or most of the necessary adjustments in the ExtraHop system instead of to the application. In this way, organizations can implement customized analysis in just minutes.

Application Inspection Triggers Example Scenarios

Triggers can address scenarios such as HTTP client segregation, benign error exclusion, security-policy auditing, and multi-tier correlation. However, the possibilities are really only limited by the creativity of the customer.

In the first example, an organization uses a triggers to segment performance metrics by client device type. The ExtraHop system already automatically detects and classifies devices on the network, and combined with AI Triggers, this capability proves useful for organizations that want to analyze user experience or activity for specific operating systems or browsers. Figure 1 below shows HTTP requests for only devices using the iPhone iOS operating system.

Figure 1: Client Segregation Using Application Inspection Triggers

Taking advantage of the NAS monitoring capabilities in the ExtraHop system, organizations can also use triggers to monitor access to sensitive folders and files by user. This capability, shown in Figure 2 below, helps organizations that need to monitor compliance with industry or government security or privacy regulations. Customized reports on folder and file access simplify policy audits, a major benefit for many IT organizations.

Figure 2: Security and Privacy Policy Monitoring Using Application Inspection Triggers

As described in the previous section, IT teams can use triggers to trace transactions across multiple tiers of their application environments. Figure 3 below shows database processing time for specific front-end transactions.

Figure 3: Multi-Tier Correlation Using Application Inspection Triggers

It’s hard to overstate the importance of AI Triggers technology for IT Operations teams. Because the ExtraHop system is a fully customizable application-monitoring platform instead of a monolithic and inflexible tool, organizations can solve the variety of problems that arise in the real world.

Recently, Concur wrote a trigger to determine the total weight of all of the SQL queries so it could identify top candidates for caching. (This was no mean feat, either. Concur deals with 2 billion SQL queries each day across more than 1,000 databases.) Concur also uses triggers to quickly investigate specific real-time metrics. The IT Operations team at Concur saw an abnormally high rate of HTTP aborts for a pool of 60 front-end webservers that host three different sites. The team couldn’t pinpoint the problem using their user-experience monitoring tool due to high traffic volume, so they instead wrote a trigger in ExtraHop that identified a webserver configured to debugging mode. Once the team turned debugging off, they immediately saw the HTTP aborts fall by 95 percent. Read the full Concur case study.

If you would like to learn more about AI Triggers and the ExtraHop system, please contact us to schedule a live demonstration or watch our online product demo.

SEATTLE, WA – July 23, 2012 – ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, moves forward in its mission to transform enterprise IT operations with the appointment of former F5 Networks executive Erik Giesa to Senior Vice President of Marketing. Previously Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at F5, Giesa joins the management team at ExtraHop to help establish next-generation APM as essential to agile IT operations.

“When planning product and market strategy at F5, a large part of my job was to meet with and listen to our customers. I witnessed firsthand how enterprise IT organizations struggle with legacy performance management frameworks and agent-based point solutions that haven’t adapted to today’s dynamic environments. CIOs are incredibly frustrated that these products weigh down their IT operations and do not live up to the promised goal of ensuring application performance,” says Giesa. “What companies need more than ever are vendors who bring a fresh approach to APM and who are honest about what they can deliver. I came to ExtraHop not only because they have a great vision for APM, but also because they are backed by a fantastic team and incredible technology not available anywhere else. What ExtraHop offers is an opportunity for companies to transform IT operations, stop wasting time and money, and invest more resources in efforts that will deliver business value.”

Before joining ExtraHop, Giesa spent 12 years at F5 Networks where he worked closely with ExtraHop co-founders Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji to build the TMOS platform and the iRules scripting language that drives F5’s DevCentral community. Giesa sees strong parallels between the potential market impact of F5’s iRules and ExtraHop’s Application Inspection Triggers (AI Triggers) technology, a framework for real-time analysis based on scriptable event processing at the application-protocol level. Giesa plans to work with the team to build a similar community at ExtraHop that will propel the power of AI Triggers even further. 

 “There is nothing more powerful than community-driven innovation,” notes Giesa. “AI Triggers are very similar to iRules in that they enable an unprecedented level of customization for an IT function where updates and improvements were previously only possible with vendor support. I have been amazed at the creativity that ExtraHop’s customers use to solve unique performance challenges. Building a community and driving ExtraHop’s market strategy to further empower our customers will be an exciting, rewarding endeavor.”

“Erik has been a member of ExtraHop’s advisory team since 2007, offering important insight and guidance,” says ExtraHop CEO Jesse Rothstein. “My co-founder Raja Mukerji and I also worked with Erik at F5 Networks, where together we helped create the market for application delivery controllers. Erik is an excellent strategist, and we look forward to accelerating our growth in the APM market with his support.”

For more information about how ExtraHop’s award-winning approach to APM is revolutionizing IT operations across virtually every industry, visit https://www.extrahop.com/products/networkbased-apm/.

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop Networks is the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system performs the fastest and deepest analysis in the industry, achieving real-time transaction monitoring at speeds up to a sustained 10Gbps in a single appliance and application-level visibility with no agents, configuration, or overhead. The ExtraHop system quickly auto-discovers and auto-classifies applications and devices, delivering immediate value out of the box. ExtraHop Networks provides award-winning solutions to companies across a wide range of industries, including ecommerce, communications, and financial services. The privately held company was founded in 2007 by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, engineering veterans from F5 Networks and architects of the BIG-IP v9 product. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop. For more information, visit www.extrahop.com.

Press Contacts
Justin Baker
ExtraHop Networks
206-453-2290
pr@extrahop.com

UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON – June 10, 2012 – ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, today announces a deal with Gullivers Travel Associates (GTA), part of the Kuoni Group and a world-class provider of hotel accommodation and travel services globally. With the peak season fast approaching, ExtraHop will provide critical visibility into GTA’s application environment ensuring any issues are spotted, diagnosed and remediated before they impact business operations.

“Lack of visibility is an issue that many IT organisations suffer from”, says Chris Anders, Vice President of IT for GTA. “We package products sourced from over 30,000 travel suppliers, 37,000 hotels and 150,000 services in more than 150 countries worldwide. When your business specialises in dealing with these amounts of data, you need to be able to see what is going on across your application environment. Application performance issues can be detrimental to business especially when real-time performance relates directly to customer experience or our internal operations.”

“Having previously invested significant amounts of time looking at APM products we originally made the decision that APM wasn’t right for us. Once we saw how much visibility we could get with ExtraHop and how easy it was to deploy, we decided that we had to invest in network-based APM to enable us to continue to provide first-class travel experiences and safeguard the future success of the company.”

The deal will see ExtraHop provide its network-based APM solution to support and expose key performance metrics at separate application tiers ensuring full visibility across the application environment. The device will sit passively on the company’s network, allowing GTA to monitor applications in a non-intrusive manner, without compromising performance.

Owen Cole, VP of EMEA, ExtraHop Networks comments: “We are delighted to be working with GTA and to be making such an impact on the everyday running of its business. Too many organisations rely on their infrastructure operating as it should and then struggle to fix things when they don’t, so it is good to see GTA taking a proactive approach to application performance management.”

The ExtraHop solution, which went live at GTA in April took just under an hour to install and configure to GTA’s network and the company is already realising the benefits of the new technology. The system allows GTA to create customised views of their data which are unique to how each individual team works and how they want information presented, helping increase efficiency through enhanced visibility, whilst also providing a holistic view of the performance of all applications.

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop Networks is the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system performs the fastest and deepest analysis in the industry, achieving real-time transaction monitoring at speeds up to a sustained 10Gbps in a single appliance and application-level visibility with no agents, configuration, or overhead. The ExtraHop system quickly auto-discovers and auto-classifies applications and devices, delivering immediate value out of the box. ExtraHop Networks provides award-winning solutions to companies across a wide range of industries, including ecommerce, communications, and financial services. The privately held company was founded in 2007 by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, engineering veterans from F5 Networks and architects of the BIG-IP v9 product. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop. For more information, visit www.extrahop.com.

Press Contacts

Justin Baker
ExtraHop Networks
206-453-2290
pr@extrahop.com

SEATTLE, WA – June 5, 2012 – ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, today announced that its solution has helped Concur Technologies, the leading provider of integrated travel and expense management services, to optimize the performance of more than one thousand databases and a memcache deployment with 52 million items. In 2010, Concur was the world’s largest SaaS ERP provider by total revenue according to Gartner.* With ExtraHop’s agentless APM solution, Concur ensures that $50 billion in annual corporate expense reports don’t fail in the cloud. ExtraHop helps Concur achieve these results by monitoring more than two billion SQL queries and 500 million memcache hits each day, identifying SQL workloads for NoSQL caching, and improving database query response times by as much as 1,000 percent.

“To support our mission of delivering continuous innovation that helps our clients drive down costs, we have to be able to serve a transaction tomorrow with fewer resources than today,” says Drew Garner, Director of Architecture Services at Concur. “ExtraHop has given us the intelligence we need to continually increase efficiency and sustain a competitive advantage.”

Seeking greater scalability, efficiency, and speed, Concur sought to replace its homegrown caching system with an open-source NoSQL memcache solution. To identify the best candidate applications for migration to memcache, Concur used the ExtraHop system to analyze billions of SQL queries each day across more than one thousand databases and passively monitor memcache transactions without impacting performance.

“Usually, people monitor memcache with server-side and client-side metrics, but there is a lot of activity in the middle that is crucial. With ExtraHop, we can monitor our memcache implementation from end to end,” adds Garner. In one case, the R&D Operations team used the ExtraHop system to find specific memcache keys that were not stored because they exceeded the default 1MB limit. “ExtraHop is the only product that could detect the problem and find the offending keys,” says Garner.

ExtraHop’s unique network-based APM solution also proved to be the only solution capable of enabling Concur to truly understand and optimize the performance of its databases. “Our DBAs could either run a trace on each database, which would be like shining a spotlight on a small section of a highway, or they could use the ExtraHop application performance management solution, which is like lighting the entire highway,” says Garner. “In many cases, the alternative to using the ExtraHop system is so time-consuming and laborious as to be impractical. But ExtraHop empowers our lean staff to manage a growing infrastructure that includes thousands of databases and an expanding memcache deployment.”

“Many companies cannot run traditional database profilers continuously in production because of the overhead involved,” says Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop CEO and co-founder. “Concur faced this challenge, and ExtraHop offered the ideal solution. The ExtraHop system is the first and only application performance management solution to provide deep visibility at massive scale without adding any overhead to networks or systems. Leading companies including Concur are using ExtraHop to monitor their applications and IT infrastructure in a way that was not previously possible. These organizations are quickly optimizing their applications and outperforming the competition.”

For more information on the key benefits that Concur has realized from using the ExtraHop system, read the full case study or view the accompanying infographic. To learn more about how the ExtraHop system’s unique network-based approach provides unparalleled database performance monitoring, visit http://www.extrahop.com/solutions/by-technology/database/.

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop Networks is the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system performs the fastest and deepest analysis in the industry, achieving real-time transaction monitoring at speeds up to a sustained 10Gbps in a single appliance and application-level visibility with no agents, configuration, or overhead. The ExtraHop system quickly auto-discovers and auto-classifies applications and devices, delivering immediate value out of the box. ExtraHop Networks provides award-winning solutions to companies across a wide range of industries, including ecommerce, communications, and financial services. The privately held company was founded in 2007 by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, engineering veterans from F5 Networks and architects of the BIG-IP v9 product. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop. For more information, visit www.extrahop.com.

Press Contact

Justin Baker
ExtraHop Networks
206-453-2290
pr@extrahop.com

The APM space is expanding and evolving at a rapid pace, leading to older established firms acquiring newer technologies to fill in the gaps in their solutions. As this evolution is certain to continue, it’s worth considering the two traditional approaches to any large enterprise IT effort, whether it be APM, BSM, BPM, SOA, ERP, SCM, or another three-letter acronym.

“Death Star” vs. Best-of-Breed

One approach to solving a new need is to implement an all-encompassing solution that promises to solve all an organization’s problems. This approach is most often advocated by major IT vendors need to feed large IT services organizations. These companies offer nebulous solutions and use all sorts of buzzwords. What customers end up receiving, however, are ponderous implementations that require teams of consultants and many months to deploy—if not years. This services-heavy, all-encompassing approach seems to be the direction in which the largest APM vendors are heading as they construct what I like to call “Death Star” APM solution portfolios.

The second approach is to implement complementary best-of-breed solutions. This approach tends to appeal to technologists that can appreciate the disruptive technical innovations that tend to arise from smaller, more agile companies. But the appeal should extend to business decision-makers as well, for the following reasons:

1. Adopting a best-of-breed approach enables companies to build on their existing investments, in terms of time, money, and training.
2. A best-of-breed approach is less risky and disruptive than “rip-and-replace” projects that often run into Murphy’s Law, where anything that can go wrong probably will.
3. With best-of-breed solutions, IT teams can utilize existing skills and are not as dependent on outside consultants.
4. Best-of-breed solutions deliver incremental value immediately. In business terms, these solutions offer fast return-on-investment and can pay for themselves in a fraction of the time it takes to procure, install, and configure a larger vendor’s product portfolio.
5. A best-of-breed approach avoids vendor lock-in, where an organization becomes tied to an aging product with increasing maintenance and per-user subscription fees.

Real-World Examples of a Best-of-Breed Approach to APM

Analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently published a report touting the success that several enterprises have had in adding on a real-time application-focused solution to their existing packet-based network monitoring product. In the case of the companies interviewed by EMA, a best-of-breed approach to APM cost-effectively addressed the need for a comprehensive APM solution that works for the entire IT organization.

The EMA white paper details exactly how a best-of-breed APM approach plays out in the real world. The companies featured in the white paper have realized all the above benefits by adding real-time application-level visibility to their existing, and trusted, packet-based network monitoring product. The organizations interviewed by EMA—including a financial transactions clearinghouse, a high-tech manufacturer, and large investment services firm—have already invested significant time and money in this product, which provides valuable L2–L4 analysis and deep packet analysis for forensic investigation of application performance issues. However, what these organizations lacked was a continuous, real-time view of application performance that analyzed valuable L7 application-level metrics across all tiers of the application infrastructure—network, web, database, and storage. By adding a network-based APM solution to their existing packet-based network monitoring tools, these organizations were able to identify problems faster through proactive early warning and dramatically increasing speed mean-time-to-resolution through cross-tier visibility.

An associate director for network management at a large investment services firm characterized the complementary nature of the two solutions. He said the network-based APM solution provided live dashboards that his team used to track activity baselines and recognize when operational indicators are outside of the norm. On the other hand, the packet-based network monitoring product is the team’s “go-to” tool when they need deep analysis, particularly if the investigation is after-the-fact. For example, the Customer Support team at this particular company has several analysts who are trained to pull packet traces and conduct detailed session and transaction reconstruction during problem investigations.

“No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM”

It’s true that purchasing a solution from a larger IT vendor can offer a sense of security, as illustrated in the old IT axiom, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” However, from both a technological and business perspective, a best-of-breed approach can deliver proven benefits. By adopting a best-of-breed approach to APM, enterprises can build on what they already have, remain free to take advantage of the best technology available, and start realizing value much faster than by chasing an all-encompassing deployment.

Download the EMA white paper examining three examples where ExtraHop Networks solutions have been deployed alongside NetScout Systems solutions.