Eliminates Manual and Statistical Approaches to Identifying and Solving Response Time Issues

NEW YORK – September 16, 2010 – Eliminating the ‘needle-in-the-haystack’ approach to identifying and solving performance problems, AppFirst, the only provider of real-time, proactive monitoring as a service (MaaS) solutions, today unveiled its Deterministic Root Cause feature. With this capability, users are alerted to the exact server where an issue is occurring, the process on the server causing the issue and what specifically the process is doing to disturb the performance of the application. By automating the formerly manual process of searching every tier of an application and every layer of the IT infrastructure to identify the source, hours, days and even weeks of time resolving performance issues are eliminated.

Using a proprietary algorithm, AppFirst moves away from the traditional statistical or manual methods of assigning probability or tediously searching to isolate causes of performance degradation. Both methods provide ample opportunity for the proposed solution to be wrong. Current solutions have a narrow focus of polling for data on a few components of an application or are language runtime specific, ensuring users are not seeing everything across the application stack.

Unlike other solutions currently available, AppFirst captures everything occurring in the entire application, and its Deterministic Root Cause feature allows users to drive right to the root cause on each and every instance. AppFirst's real-time collection of application behavior data across the entire application, no matter where it runs, accurately captures what is happening within the application. Using that data, AppFirst's Deterministic Root Cause capability identifies the offending server, the offending process and exactly what it is doing to negatively affect performance.

“As server infrastructures continue to grow in size and complexity, the task of managing them grows disproportionally as well, providing plenty of opportunity for performance degradation,” said Bernd Harzog, CEO for APM Experts. “The majority of monitoring vendors do not collect unique data, do not have the agnostic approach to operating systems or application, and don’t provide a real-time topology map of an application running on a dynamic infrastructure. Only AppFirst takes you right to the root of the problem deterministically.”

Solving the External Response Time Pain
One of an IT department’s biggest pain points is identifying the source of response time issues. AppFirst automatically identifies response time degradation before customers might even notice a slowdown with its Deterministic Root Cause feature. AppFirst users receive an alert email or SMS notifying them of the problem, what server was causing it, what process on that server and the process activity causing the degradation. This level of accuracy and specificity to IT operations has never been available hence the hours, days and sometimes weeks it takes to track down a problem. AppFirst takes the guess work out by deterministically identifying the issue. For performance issues not related to response time, AppFirst provides its Root Cause Wizard to walk users through the root cause process to deliver issue resolution.

Monitoring as a Service (MaaS)
With the continued trend of offering storage, software, infrastructure and even application platforms as a service, Harzog recently coined this emerging market Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), defining the move to monitor all services, especially in the case where they are co-mingled with services and applications running inside of a data center.

Harzog defines the space to include products that provide a unique level of visibility into actual applications performance (response time) and the topology of the applications system from its perspective in the OS. Further, Harzog states that AppFirst is a full MaaS solution, and is the only one that delivers a viable approach to monitoring complex, rapidly changing, and distributed applications.

“Insight into an application, regardless of where it resides is one thing, but insight doesn’t mean specific problems are easily found or resolved,” said David Roth, CEO and co-founder for AppFirst. “Being able to drill down directly to the cause of every problem, and the exact process creating each problem, delivers a significant and valuable benefit to an organization, and most importantly, to customers using the applications. There is no other solution on the market today that can deliver this level of capability.”