Trouble seeing what AWS workloads are doing? Extrahop wants to help

I've spoken with the folks at ExtraHop on many ocassions to discuss application performance management (APM), different approaches to APM, managing virtualized environments and even management as a service offerings. This time ExtraHop is offering a tool to help users of Amazon Web Services (AWS) gain better visibility into what their cloud workloads are doing.

In the past, it has been challenging for IT administrators to be able to learn about workload operational metrics such as the following:

• Details of transaction processing including: transaction volume, variability, latency, errors, size, and other metrics for AWS regions and zones.
• Details of SQL database processing including: query volume, methods, errors, SQL statements, and related details.
• Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling perameters such as: ELB and auto-scaling policies and size instances making it possible for adminitrators to properly and automatically scale up new EC2 instances based on transaction metrics, and detect and respond to DDoS attacks immediately to minimize impact on end users.

Rather than going out on its own, ExtraHop for AWS integrates with an augments AWS CloudWatch.

ExtraHop is competing with a number of others, such as AppDynamics, BMC, Compuware dynatrace, and New Relic,  who want to make AWS a more managable platform. ExtraHop's claim to fame is its ability to watch and learn from network traffic rather than forcing organizations to heavily instrument their workloads.

Is ExtraHop for AWS the right tool for the job? Since each organization's environment and skillset is different that would have to be determined on a case-by-case basis. What is clear is that ExtraHop for AWS is worth learning about.