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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3 Views of your Application
April 13th, 2010 by admin
If you are part of the 95% of the rest of us you are missing the critical 3rd view of your application. I’m getting ahead of myself. To say that that you may or may not be missing a view of your application implies that there is more than one view of an application. So, what is a view? It’s not complicated; it’s simply the way you think of your application, the picture in your head about what the app is and how it works, that’s your view of the application.
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Introducing AppFirst
April 13th, 2010 by admin
Welcome to the AppFirst blog. My name is David Roth and I am a founder & CEO of AppFirst, Inc. We have all seen the aggressive adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) along with applications leveraging Cloud Computing. What has this trend done? It has shifted the “Application Operations” burden; from set up to every detail ensuring it works, from the end user or corporate buyer to the ISV. Beyond writing great software ISV’s now need to learn how to deliver “operational excellence” specific to their application or the consequences are stark ranging from the loss of customers due to any performance issues to the excess spend that occurs from over-provisioning because there is no visibility to what each application component actually consumes from a production hardware resource perspective.
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