Blog
More is Not Always Better for Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
September 16, 2011
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
![Legacy APM Tools - click to enlarge in a new window](https://assets.extrahop.com/migrated/uploads/Legacy-APM-Tools2-300x226.png)
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
![ExtraHop Network-based APM](https://assets.extrahop.com/migrated/uploads/ExtraHop-Network-based-APM1-300x226.png)
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.
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