What’s New At AppFirst 8/30/10

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Here’s what’s new at AppFirst this week!

New Features

• Automatic Time Correction - Collector times are now corrected automatically.  If your server’s clock is incorrect, everything will still work correctly and display correct times.
• New Signup Process - We have a new signup process that is much clearer and easier to understand!
• More Links in Monitor Widgets – We’ve added more links in Monitor widgets, so it’s even easier to dig deeper into the inner workings of your infrastructure.
• Sorted Alert Trigger Names - Alert trigger names are now sorted and categorized for more efficient new alert creation.
• UX Improvements on Resolve – Improved share link, table data, and error handling.
• New Automatic Server Down Alert – We now automatically create a Server Down alert for each new server that you add.
• Help Messages – We’ve added Welcome and Help pop-up messages on Monitor, Data Flow, and Resolve, to walk new users through the solutions.
• 5-minute Option – We’ve added a new 5-minute option on the Summary widget.  Now you can see the number of alerts triggered, uptime percentage, and average response time for the last 5 minutes.
• Fractional Values Supported on Windows Performance Counters – The Windows collector now supports fractional values for Windows Performance Counters.

Bug Fixes

• Data Flow now auto-fits to browser height
• Many bug fixes on Data Flow and Resolve
• When an account expires, the user can now enter a credit card instead of having to email support
• Changed Monitor widget behavior – they now use “Show/Hide” instead of paging to show additional data
• Fixed behind-the-scenes handling of Applications to be more reliable and faster
• Added minor speed-ups to many pages
• Fixed link and added clarification to External Response Time (on a server) alert email
• Linux collector now correctly obeys the include parameter filter (you can set this on the collector settings page)

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 8/12/10

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Here’s what’s new at AppFirst this week!

New Features

• Update Collectors Button - We’ve added a button on the Manage Collectors page to let you automatically update your collectors.  You’ll also get popup reminders to let you know when you need to update your collectors.
• Increased Support for Limiting File Pathnames - We’ve added support for limiting (even to 0) the number of file pathnames that the collector will upload.  If you have processes that are using a lot of really long filenames, it used to make the collector slower than you might have wished.  Now you can go to the Manage Collectors page and control the max number of pathnames the collector will keep in a single upload cycle.  If you have a LOT, it may still make the collector run slowly.  You can set this value to zero to make the collector even speedier!

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some incorrect edge case handling in Alerting
• Added better language and command line arguments to process termination and collector down alerts
• Fixed very rare cases where the Linux collector could crash an application

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 8/6/10

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Here’s what’s new at AppFirst this week!

New Features

• Added Summary (Key Performance Indicator) widget – There’s a new widget on the Dashboard called Summary!  On this widget, you can see the number of alerts triggered, the uptime percentage, and the average response time for the last hour, day, week, or month.  Add this new widget to your Dashboard by clicking “Add Widget” at the top of the Monitor tab.
• Mobile App - AppFirst is now on the App Store!  Use your iPhone or iPad to monitor your infrastructure and get alerts on the go!
• Data Flow Improvements
  • Added a list of IP addresses on each node (including the External node)
  • Added historical mean and standard deviation to each node to help determine if current average response time is abnormal
  • Improved table data – when you click on a server on the graph, a table will appear with a list of all the names of processes running on that server, as well as the average response time and number of network connections for each process
  • Now you can look at historical data on Data Flow by choosing “Hour” from the menu and selecting the particular hour you want to view
• Visual improvements – We updated the look and feel of the product, especially the Dashboard.  More to come on this project in the next few weeks and months!
• UDP Socket Support - Added UDP socket support on Windows collector
• Speed improvements – General speed improvements when loading data

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug in the collector that caused response time for long running processes to be incorrect
• Fixed several Data Flow bugs
• Fixed Share link in Resolve – now it always works the way it should!
• Added better error handling if requests time out

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 7/28/10

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

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 7/21/10

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

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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Nagios Support and More!

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

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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