More is Not Always Better for Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Back to top
September 16, 2021
More is Not Always Better for Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
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 data center 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.
The complexity in legacy APM results from a flawed bottom-up model for monitoring applications. This model suggests that if you monitor every single element independently you are therefore monitoring your entire

Sadly, there's a reason legacy application performance monitoring vendors hesitate to solve this problem: their dependency on consulting revenue. Even if a legacy APM vendor succeeded in developing a simple and elegant solution that passively analyzed every transaction across every tier—thereby obviating the need for millions of dollars in consultant-driven customized correlation engines—would they release it? Probably not, as it would break their revenue model.
At ExtraHop, we believe it's time to kill your agents and stop the arms race costing you millions of dollars and years of consulting effort to implement an effective APM platform. ExtraHop Networks is the first vendor to

Application performance monitoring can be this simple, and the entire application and all of its elements can be monitored and managed from a simple yet powerful solution. It should not take 6 to 12 months and $10 to 20 million to implement an effective application performance monitoring platform. And with ExtraHop, it doesn't. Our solution installs in minutes and offers full visibility into production application performance within hours. Sound too good to be true? It probably does given the amount of marketing noise out there, but we would love to prove it. Give us a call or check out the ExtraHop demo to learn more.
Discover more

ExtraHop is on a mission to arm security teams to confront active threats and stop breaches. Our RevealX™ 360 platform, powered by cloud-scale AI, covertly decrypts and analyzes all cloud and network traffic in real time to eliminate blind spots and detect threats that other tools miss. Sophisticated machine learning models are applied to petabytes of telemetry collected continuously, helping ExtraHop customers to identify suspicious behavior and secure over 15 million IT assets, 2 million POS systems, and 50 million patient records. ExtraHop is a market share leader in network detection and response with 30 recent industry awards including Forbes AI 50, Cybercrime Ransomware 25, and SC Media Security Innovator.
Learn more at our About Us page.