New Modules Help Web IT Teams Keep Applications Running at Peak Performance
O'Reilly Velocity Conference 2011
SANTA CLARA, CA – June 14, 2011 – ExtraHop Networks, a leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, today announced the industry's first Memcache Module designed to monitor and analyze objects stored in memcached, as well as a new Action Message Format (AMF) Module to deliver insight into Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Both of these new modules provide real-time insight into web services for web architects and Operations teams to keep applications available and performing optimally.
Memcached, used by popular websites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia, is an open-source, distributed, in-memory object cache that allows for faster access to and distribution of data by eliminating the need to query the database. Keeping the most frequently accessed applications in memcached speeds the performance of dynamic, database-driven websites that must manage significant numbers of user queries and large data volumes. However, without visibility into the health and performance of memcached, errors and misconfigurations can undermine the performance benefits of the technology and pose serious risks to the availability of web services. ExtraHop's new Memcache Module gives companies real-time and trend-based historical monitoring of valuable memcached performance data.
"This new module from ExtraHop is vital in helping us to migrate critical applications to memcached, providing the visibility needed to continue to monitor and assure their performance," said Drew Garner, Director Architecture Services, Concur. "For instance, we recently wanted to determine if a specific application was a good candidate for memcached and, using ExtraHop's existing Database Module, were able to see that it gets called around one million times a day, but the response time was less than optimal. And, now, with ExtraHop's Memcache Module, we can both see significant response-time improvements and continue to have confidence in the performance of everything residing in the cache—a truly invaluable addition to our monitoring capabilities."
ExtraHop Networks also introduced today a new AMF Module to add to the growing lineup of modules for the ExtraHop system. AMF, first introduced by Adobe in 2007, underlies RIAs built on Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex data services. With the ExtraHop AMF Module, traffic to these RIAs is monitored to extract specific fields for requested metrics, responses or errors, and retrieved objects. This additional visibility and analysis at the application level for client-facing and web-services traffic helps Web Operations teams to pinpoint and resolve risks before they turn into major problems.
"As computing becomes increasingly distributed and web services continue to grow, having visibility into memcached applications and AMF for RIAs is paramount," said Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder, ExtraHop Networks. "Without such visibility, companies have no way of knowing if servers or applications are producing errors or slow response times, which can cause potentially business-crippling effects. This is precisely what we have set out to proactively monitor with our new Memcache and AMF Modules. These two additions to the ExtraHop system bring significant improvements to application visibility for Web IT teams and raise the bar for application performance management as a whole."
The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is a real-time, passive network appliance that monitors and analyzes every business-critical transaction from L2 to L7 across network, web, database, and storage tiers, spanning physical and virtual environments. The ExtraHop system combines the troubleshooting capabilities of Network Performance Managers with the superior application-level visibility of User Experience Monitors to perform sophisticated network-traffic analysis. While many tools rely on legacy technologies such as NetFlow collection, SNMP polling, custom performance agents, or active service checks, the ExtraHop system performs full-stream reassembly and full-content analysis to extract and archive valuable performance and health metrics in a real-time datastore.
To learn more about the ExtraHop Memcache Module and AMF Module as well as the ExtraHop system, be sure to visit the ExtraHop team at the O'Reilly Velocity Conference at booth # 509, or visit http://www.extrahop.com/products/. If you are a member of the press or analyst community interested in setting up a meeting with ExtraHop at Velocity, please contact Meredith L. Eaton at pr@extrahop.com or 617-960-9877.