ExtraHop Dominates Network World's 2014 APM "Shootout"

You've heard the old saying, "Never bring a knife to a gun fight." Well, ExtraHop clearly had its guns blazing for Network World's 2014 "APM Shootout" and won by a landslide. With an overall score of 4.8/5 (the closest competitor scored 3.9/5), the value, performance, and ease-of-use of ExtraHop's wire data analytics platform crushed the other application performance monitoring offerings. Competitors included BMC EUEM (formerly Coradiant), Dell Foglight, Fluke Visual TruView, and BlueStripe FactFinder in rigorous, independent lab testing.

APM Vendor Comparison Results

Naming ExtraHop the best solution for solving application performance challenges, Network World compared all five vendors across a range of core APM capabilities, as follows:

ExtraHop outperformed the APM solutions across the board, receiving the highest possible score in five out of six categories. Network World also called out a number of key features of our wire data analytics platform, including:

• A responsive, intuitive, and easy-to-navigate web interface and a fully customizable dashboard for uncomplicated visibility and reporting. Network World's testing team also appreciated ExtraHop's Activity Maps, which offer a graphical visualization of application communications and dependencies.
• Versatile, easy-to-assemble flex grids that can be configured to provide value for a wide array of users, from CIOs and network operations teams to database administrators and developers.
• Passive, continuous, and accurate discovery of devices and applications on the network.
• Application inspection triggers that make it easy to isolate the performance of specific applications and transactions, and enable IT teams to define additional metrics and ignore irrelevant errors.
• Comprehensive support for VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments
• Deep visibility into AWS workloads, including EC2, RDS, S3, and ELB.

Capabilities Extend Far Beyond Traditional APM

Ironically, despite the dominant performance, ExtraHop almost decided not to participate in this competition when originally asked. The reason is simple: ExtraHop's wire data analytics platform goes far beyond the capabilities of traditional APM tools. Application performance monitoring is just a subset of what the ExtraHop platform does.

By passively monitoring all L2-L7 communications, including the full bi-directional transactional payloads, ExtraHop offers IT teams deep, correlated visibility across all tiers of the IT environment so that they can plan capacity, tune infrastructure, manage IT assets, track compliance with privacy and security policies, and detect malware and data leakage. In addition, ExtraHop extracts valuable information from wire data to help business leaders make more insightful decisions.

With ExtraHop's ability to provide much greater, much deeper application visibility than traditional, legacy APM vendors, this "shootout" was over before the first shot was ever fired.