AppNeta releases unified solution for performance management

AppNeta, after acquiring Tracelytics, has just launched what the company is describing as a "unified solution for performance management and end user experience monitoring." AppNeta is calling this new performance management service TraceView.

Here's what the company has to say about its new service offering:

AppNeta’s newest performance management service, TraceView, the only full-stack application tracing solution for a DevOps world, enables smarter, easier Web application performance management. TraceView gives you the WOW factor with incredible performance data visualization of requests in your web application. The TraceView cloud-delivered application monitoring service covers you from end-to-end, providing insight into your ACTUAL performance data across your various application layers and hosts on which your business-critical applications rely.

So what do you get from TraceView?

• Application Performance Monitoring: Visualize and monitor your applications for latency, or subsection of traffic, to pinpoint and resolve problems quickly!

• Cloud and SOA Friendly: Install TraceView throughout your distributed web environment and get the complete picture of your application’s performance.

• Advanced Analysis and Real Data Visualizations: TraceView heat maps let you select your problem and drill down.

• Error Reporting and Alerting: Proactively set alerts to report on errors, latency and machine metrics.

• Server Monitoring: Ensure that you’re not overpaying for infrastructure, or losing business due to overloaded servers.

• Supported Environments: TraceView supports Java, PHP, Python and Ruby applications.

Snapshot analysis

Application performance management (APM) is quite tricky in a multi-platform, highly distributed, multi-tier application environment. Suppliers, such as BMC, CA, CompuWare, HP, IBM, Microsoft, OPNET Technologies, OpTier, eG Innovations, ExtraHop, New Relic, Nastel Technologies, XO and quite a host of other smaller companies are offering products addressing a company's need to know what is going on and head off the impact of performance problems.

Some require the installation of agents on each system. Others rely on watching the management information APIs systems, operating systems, application frameworks, applications and database engines all expose to the network. Another group captures and scans network traffic looking for useful information as application components and systems communicate with one another. The most sophisticated offerings do all of these things to get a real-time view of what is happening.

A few suppliers have added sophisticated analysis that makes it possible to predict problems based upon the operational data that flows by. Certain things happen before a failure and when those things start to appear in the stream of operational data, the management product can send out an alert or even take specific action to head off an outage.

AppNeta appears to be limiting its focus to applications developed for the following environments: Java, PHP, Python and Ruby. While this focus captures quite a bit of today's Web applications, it falls far short of being able to see into all of the applications that are likely to be found in today's data center. So, TraceView can not be seen as a full solution to monitoring end user and performance management.

I've spoken with well over 25 companies in this space over the last couple of years. This means that AppNeta has its work cut out to just be heard amidst all of the marketing noise in this market. The company has to find a way to distinguish itself from all of the other competitors trying to do the same. Can AppNeta, regardless of the strength of its technology, capture a significant share of decision-maker's attention? That is the key question the company has yet to answer.