What’s New At AppFirst
July 29th, 2010 by Amy
Here’s what’s new at AppFirst this week!
New Features
- 14-day free trial - There are a few reasons we’ve made this switch, but the most important one is to further support our integration with CloudSigma, which also offers a 14-day free trial. Now you can have a 14-day free trial of AppFirst and CloudSigma together!
- Process and application response time – We added response times for processes and Applications on Resolve graphs. You can also set response time Alerts on processes and Applications.
- Data Flow improvements - We made some improvements on Data Flow, including a table of response times for processes and bi-directional response times on edges. Look out for more Data Flow improvements next week!
- Ubuntu 10 support - We now support Ubuntu 10!
Bug Fixes
- Fixed missing intercept in Linux connector
- Fixed incorrect average response time calculation for Applications
- Added more links and instructions for setting up polled data from the product
- Minor improvements to the Setup page for better user experience
Have you noticed a problem that needs fixing, or do you have a great idea for a new feature on AppFirst? Let us know! We rely on your feedback to make a product that works for everyone!
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What’s New at AppFirst
July 21st, 2010 by Amy
There are always exciting new things happening with AppFirst, and we want to keep you in the loop! So here’s what’s new on AppFirst as of today:
New Features
- Free CloudSigma trial - We are very excited to partner with CloudSigma, an awesome cloud hosting provider! Don’t have a good place to download a collector? No problem! Now you can use CloudSigma to host your applications while monitoring them with AppFirst. And best of all, you get a 14-day free trial along with your free trial of AppFirst!
- New Users – You can opt in during the signup process
- Current Users – Just go to your AppFirst account page to activate your free trial with CloudSigma
- Partner Referral Code – We added some groundwork this week for our upcoming partner program. Want to partner with AppFirst? Contact us for more information.
- UDP Support - We now support UDP network connections!
Bug Fixes
- Faster Data Insight loading
- Fixed reliability issue with the table of processes on the Dashboard Servers widget
- Addressed performance issue with Nagios alerting when a single tenant is down
- We made a fix regarding CPU values – now they should always show up correctly!
Have you noticed a problem that needs fixing, or do you have a great idea for a new feature on AppFirst? Let us know! We rely on your feedback to make a product that works for everyone!
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Vote For Us!
June 25th, 2010 by Amy
AppFirst is highlighted this month on DiscoveringStartups.com! Please check out our review and vote for us!
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Cloud Monitoring
June 21st, 2010 by David
Cloud computing has widespread mainstream usage, yet when it comes to monitoring and management in the clouds, there are still a lot of limits on what can be monitored.
There are a number of offerings that tell you the overall health of each of the largest cloud platforms. When there are incidents, you can see some sort of description of the problems. What’s missing here? You. Your applications. Your slice of that cloud infrastructure is not being shown, just an overall macro view.
There are some products that monitor the utilization of each of your server instances from a memory & CPU perspective. They’ll even offer you access to an API where you can automatically spin up new server instances when you exceed memory or CPU thresholds. This is great for the cloud vendors to increase their revenue, but what does this do to help you?
What we deliver at AppFirst today is the visibility inside each instance that your applications are using. Now you can know the metrics inside and out about what component (process or set of processes) of your infrastructure is consuming which resources. We have heard from many of you and understand that you want to know the infrastructure consumption details per component, and you want enough detail to analyze for yourself whether there are opportunities for you to make changes (either in configuration or code) on your end rather than spawning volumes of new instances without knowing why.
Soon, we will also be able to provide you with automated awareness to response time issues with deterministic root cause details, pointing out not only the problem that’s been identified, but also where to go to solve it.
Knowing that there are such great potential benefits of cloud computing, we are here to provide you with the level of detail we know you need to manage your applications. You can realize the performance you want while leveraging the elasticity of the cloud.
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Nagios Support and More!
May 26th, 2010 by proussos
At AppFirst, we move quickly to incorporate your feedback and deliver, so we release into production every Wednesday. This week, we’re pushing some very exciting and significant new features into production, and we want to share them with you:
1) Nagios support — we now integrate with Nagios on Linux!
- If you have Nagios Client scripts running on your servers, the AppFirst collector will automatically pick up the output of the scripts (given you have everything running in the default directory). Then the collector will send the output message to our backend, so you can visualize messages on the AppFirst Dashboard and alerts on AppFirst Alert Management.
- If you are using the Nagios Server, there is no need to continue doing so. You now have one consolidated view of your infrastructure that includes your Nagios scripts.
- If your Nagios Client installation is not in the default directory, you can specify the correct location by editing the collector(s) that are affected. In the future, should you decide to install new Nagios Client scripts, AppFirst will automatically detect them, incorporate the messages on AppFirst Dashboard, and create new alerts.
- In addition, it will no longer be necessary to install the out-of-box Nagios Client scripts on new servers, because AppFirst will collect the information for you. This new feature in AppFirst will save you the cost of a server and days of time installing and configuring the Nagios Server.
2) Automatic attachment to running processes
- When you install new collectors, you no longer have to restart processes or reboot your machine in order for the AppFirst collector to start “seeing” your application as it executes. If you already have collectors installed, you will have to reinstall the new version. To do so:
Redhat/CentOS
- First remove collector from the host
$ sudo yum remove appfirst
- Download/Install the latest rpm package
$ sudo rpm -ihv http://wwws.appfirst.com/packages/initial/1/appfirst-i386.rpm 32 bit version
$ sudo rpm -ihv http://wwws.appfirst.com/packages/initial/1/appfirst-x86_64.rpm 64 bit version
Ubuntu
- First remove collector from the host
$ sudo apt-get remove appfirst
- Download the latest deb package
$ sudo wget http://wwws.appfirst.com/packages/initial/1/appfirst-x86_64.deb 64 bit version
$ sudo wget http://wwws.appfirst.com/packages/initial/1/appfirst-i386.deb 32 bit version
- Install the newly downloaded package
$ sudo dpkg -i appfirst-x86_64.deb // 64bit
$ sudo dpkg -i appfirst-i386.deb // 32bit
Windows
- First remove collector from the host – Control Panel – Add/Remove programs – Uninstall AppFirst program
- From AppFirst console administation -> collectors -> instructions select the appropriate Windows version
- Install the downloaded collector
3) Renaming Tags
- We’ve heard from you that the term “Tags” is confusing. We have now renamed Tags to Applications. Applications are entities you create by logically grouping processes together, whether they run on one or more servers. These groupings represent the way you think about your infrastructure (ex. your database, job messaging system, shopping cart, etc….)
- To learn more, check out our new Applications page and demo videos on www.appfirst.com!
4) Significant changes to the Alert Management system
- You can now set alerts on processes, applications and servers.
- We have also added new types of alerts for processes and applications based on incident reports, files, registry and ports accessed. With these new powerful alerts, you can be alerted when certain strings are identified in incident reports, and user-specified files, registry or ports are accessed.
- If you are using Nagios on Linux, AppFirst now automatically creates alerts for every Nagios script you have enabled. These are displayed on AppFirst Alert Management where you can edit or delete them.
As always, we very much appreciate your support and feedback. Please keep it coming!
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Down Time
May 17th, 2010 by Donn
AppFirst was down for approximately 10 minutes today. Our tenant database encountered performance issues. They were severe enough to cause requests to time out between the back end and front end. Please note we don’t manage data streamed from your servers in a database, we use flat files. The database is used to manage tenant details as well as state information for remote collectors.
Our monitoring showed us that response times between the front end and client browsers was slowing quickly. We followed the response times to the connection between database and front end. A detailed look at the database application using Data Insight showed that the aggregate of the four Postgres processes were using a lot more memory than was normal. We also saw that page faults for the four Postgres processes were high and growing.
A look at the database made it clear we needed to vacuum it. We had vacuumed the database three months ago and at that time enabled auto vacuum. It’s clear we need to understand exactly what auto vacuum is enabling.
We apologize for any inconvenience this outage may have caused.
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The Value of Real Data
May 13th, 2010 by Donn
For better or worse, I’m a baseball fan. It’s something I grew up with. My grandparents were devout Detroit Tigers fans. Some of my fondest memories are of listening to the game on the radio with grandparents and extended family.
One of the talking points in baseball circles these days is the pace of the game. It was a recent topic when the Red Sox and Yankees took nearly 5 hours to play a game last month. There are a few generally accepted reasons why some of the games take longer than others. Most people passionately describe the time consumed when the catcher goes to the mound to talk to the pitcher and the amount of time consumed by the pitcher between pitches. In fact, MLB has instituted new rules this year that are supposed to govern some of these times.
A funny thing happened recently in the midst of all of this discussion. A baseball writer (Didn’t write down his name…) sat down with video of several notoriously long games and measured times. He used a stop watch to measure the amount of time taken for each individual activity. With absolute times in hand, he was able to clearly tell precisely where time was consumed. The activities that took most of the time were not those generally accepted to be the culprits. It turned out, for example, that Derek Jeter stepping out of the batter’s box and walking around between pitches consumed a lot more time than any of the pitchers or visits to the mound by a catcher.
Why bore you with all the baseball reference? It’s an example from my personal frame of reference that illustrates an aspect of the human condition that affects the management of IT infrastructure. It’s really easy to accept that something is factual when one or more individuals speak with passion that it is so. That system is slow because the java app is using too much memory, or it’s slow because the database is over extended. It’s all too easy to accept. I’ve done it. We had a recent performance issue with our back-end servers. Our entire development team, myself included, was convinced that the issue stemmed from the aggregation of data. We all just accepted that as reality because it made a lot of sense. It was logical. However, when we looked at the visualization of the applications on our infrastructure, it was very clear very quickly that we were all wrong. Data aggregation was really consuming less than 5% of CPU resources. It was the act of responding to API requests that were consuming up to 30% of CPU.
The point is; get the facts. Easier said than done, I know. You don’t have access to the real facts if you are looking at server resources alone – they are insufficient to see the detail you need. Transaction times alone aren’t going to fully inform. All of the copious information that you can get from individual components is a patchwork of data, much of it contradictory. The information from byte code insertion tools is detailed, but it doesn’t help much with management of your application infrastructure. Maybe if you wrote much of the code yourself, you can get what you need. Either way, it’s like real work to get what you need.
What you need is a consistent view of the apps running on your infrastructure. A view that is the same for all apps; web server, app server, database, Java, .Net, Ruby, PHP…well, you get the idea. If you are managing infrastructure, do you care which line of code is calling a SQL statement? Do you care if you’re dealing with Java or Ruby? You do care about the performance profile, about what resources the apps require, about bottlenecks. So, why not look at what matters to you?
Give it a try – it’s easy and not at all scary: http://appfirst.com/sandbox/
Tags: Donn
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IT Operations has spoken and AppFirst is listening!
May 10th, 2010 by David
I hear you loud and clear! You spend all of your time putting out fires and, with the big gap in monitoring tools, you’ll never get out of that mode.
It’s time to do better than “your father’s monitoring products”. System monitors only tell you the health of the physical or virtual box (with no insight to what’s inside). Application-specific probes and agents don’t paint a complete n-tier application picture. Byte-code analysis doesn’t see the entire application as it executes, and it focuses on finding code problems that lead to performance issues when, actually, the majority of IT Operations issues are due to non-code-specific changes in the infrastructure configuration or usage patterns. As you can see, there’s a huge gap of unaddressed monitoring needs for IT operations.
Until you can see your entire application stack as it executes in real time, you’ll still be settling for blind spots that lead to fire fighting and extended delays while you try to put out the fires.
With help and input from your IT peers, AppFirst has not only listened but has built the only Infrastructure Performance Management Solution that:
- Visualizes your entire application stack as it executes
- Captures the response times and detailed resource utilization profiles for every application
- Automatically and continuously discovers and maps the topology of every application
- Allows you to know with certainty what’s changing within your application and to use this insight to make smart infrastructure decisions to reduce performance issues and lower your costs
- Works across Windows, Linux, physical deployments, virtual deployments and cloud deployments
- Takes minutes to set up and provides instant value
What does all of this mean? AppFirst is delivering the industry’s first deterministic IT Infrastructure root cause analysis solution! By determining what has changed when slower than acceptable response times occur, we can provide IT with not only the complete view of the application stack, but also the depth to know in minutes all the information that has eluded IT without us.
Your time is valuable, your company’s cost of operations matters, and we are committed to your success in achieving your goals in these metrics.
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AppFirst Clinches Judges and Audience Choice Honors at Under the Radar
April 21st, 2010 by proussos
Named Application Development and Management Category Winner
NEW YORK – April 22, 2010 – AppFirst, the only provider of real-time, proactive monitoring solutions, was chosen as both Judges’ and Audience Choice at Under the Radar in the Application Development and Management category. The company unveiled AppFirst Professional Edition, the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based application performance monitoring solution that can provide unique visibility into an entire application – regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers) at the event last week in Mountain View, CA. AppFirst enables SaaS IT operations to proactively monitor applications, driving down the cost of operations, see changes before they become problems and improve customer satisfaction.
“AppFirst is dedicated to delighting customers by providing them complete insight into how their applications are behaving on the infrastructure,” said David Roth, CEO and co-founder for AppFirst. “We’re honored to be selected as winners by the esteemed judges and our peers.”
AppFirst was selected to present at Under the Radar: Commercializing the Cloud. In its 16th series, the conference showcases the best of breed technology startups in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem. Judges include CIOs, CTOs and IT executives from Bank of America, ING, MTV, Digg, Intuit, Salesforce, Rackspace and more. Under the Radar is designed to connect CEOs, technology executives, investors, analysts and press together with one ultimate goal: to get the deal done. A complete list of winners can be found at http://www.undertheradarblog.com/blog/announcing-under-the-radar-winners-who-came-out-on-cloud-9/.
“Under the Radar showcases innovative startups with the intention of introducing them to potential customers and partners,” noted Debbie Landa, CEO and Founder for DealMaker Media, producer of Under the Radar. “We take months to carefully select companies to participate at Under the Radar, therefore winning the recognition of the judges and audience, like AppFirst did, says a lot.”
About AppFirst, Inc.
AppFirst delivers a SaaS-based application performance management solution uniquely providing IT operations complete visibility into the behavior and performance of applications across the entire application stack, regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers). Visibility into the executing application enables proactive monitoring to drive down cost of operations, see changes before they become problems and reduce customer churn. Founded in 2009, AppFirst is a New York City-based company venture backed by FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital. More information is available at www.appfirst.com.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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AppFirst Launches First SaaS-Based Application Performance Monitoring Solution for Entire Application
April 15th, 2010 by admin
SaaS IT Operations Go from Reactive to Proactive with AppFirst
Direct View of Application Execution Environment Offers Advanced Monitoring Capabilities for Improved Performance, Satisfaction and Costs
NEW YORK and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – April 16, 2010 – AppFirst today announced the immediate availability of AppFirst Professional Edition, the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based application performance monitoring solution at the Under the Radar: Commercializing the Cloud event in Mountain View, Calif. With only one piece of software users are provided unique visibility into an entire application – regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers). AppFirst enables SaaS IT operations to proactively monitor applications, driving down the cost of operations, see changes before they become problems and improve customer satisfaction.
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