Application Inspection Triggers: Providing Right APM Data, to the Right People, at the Right Time

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1 Application Inspection Triggers: Providing Right APM Data, to the Right People, at the Right Time Introduction As application environments continue to grow in both size and complexity, visibility has increasingly become a key factor in Application Performance Management (APM). Today s APM solutions generally allow for performance measurement of diverse elements of an application environment. The problem arises with analyzing and correlating this (often overwhelming) flood of data. Sixty percent of organizations that participated in TRAC's recent research reported that the key challenge for using Application Performance Management data is the amount of information that is not relevant for a problem that they are trying to solve. Organizations are increasingly looking to improve the value of network and application performance data that they have in hand and ensure that they can turn it into information that is truly actionable. This report from TRAC Research examines how the capabilities of ExtraHop's Application Inspection Triggers align with the emerging trends in the network and application performance monitoring market. Market Context Sixty-four percent of organizations that participated in TRAC's recent research reported that the amount of management overhead is one of the top challenges for monitoring the performance of application transactions (Figure 1). Additionally, organizations are reporting that the ability to monitor performance without modifying application code is a critical capability. As organizations seek to gain more visibility into application performance, they are looking to reduce management cost without sacrificing visibility. This drives the need for a monitoring approach that would eliminate the overhead that monitoring agents are adding to the IT infrastructure, while providing in-depth information that is truly relevant and actionable. June 2012

2 Figure 1: Top Challenges for Monitoring Application Transactions Source: TRAC Research, March 2011 This research makes the case that organizations are looking to reduce management costs while at the same time gain more visibility into application performance. This represents a need for a solution that reduces the overhead required by traditional technologies, while at the same time providing actionable and relevant information. Additionally, the research shows that the inability to customize views into performance data for different stakeholders is the key challenge for monitoring the quality of user experience for fifty-five percent of organizations. With the performance of business critical applications impacting a wide range of operational and business goals, organizations are looking for capabilities that allow them to define custom views into this data, based on the specific needs of different job roles and business groups. At the same time, the increasing complexity of managing IT performance means that organizations have to process and analyze large amounts of data in order to make educated decisions about preventing and resolving performance problems. Ensuring that the right data is delivered to the right people, at the right time, is becoming the key for effectively dealing with application performance management issues. In Figure 2, we see that the top APM capability that organizations are looking to deploy is the ability to use a single solution for monitoring both network and application performance. This comes as a result of this capability being effective in addressing key challenges of application performance management, such as: How to reduce time spent on troubleshooting issues by being able to quickly correlate data about the performance of different elements of the application delivery chain Page 2

3 How to reduce management cost from deploying, managing and integrating different point solutions for monitoring the performance of individual "silos" within the IT. How to identify the impact of changes in IT infrastructure on the quality of user experience. Figure 2: Top Capabilities Driving New Deployments of APM Solutions Network and app performance monitoring delivered through a single platform 34% Visibility into in- screen metrics 29% Automated corrective actions triggered when performance doesn't meet requirements Dynamic application dependency mapping 19% 22% Open APIs for APM solution 18% Source: TRAC Research, March 2011 Overview of Application Inspection Triggers ExtraHop Networks provides solutions for holistically monitoring network and application performance. The company's core product is its Application Assurance Delivery system, an appliance-based solution for passive monitoring. In May of 2011, ExtraHop introduced Application Inspection Triggers, a functionality that allows customers to customize transaction analysis data at the application protocol level, and at network speeds. This capability allows organizations to improve visibility into network and application performance by having the ability to custom define metrics that are being monitored and the types of reports that are being generated. This capability is part of ExtraHop's Application Assurance Delivery system and it allows organizations to not only improve their capabilities for analyzing application performance, but also to make the best use of the range and depth of data that ExtraHop's appliances can capture. One of the key benefits of ExtraHop's approach towards monitoring network and application performance is the fact that the company provides deep visibility into application performance in multiple IT domains without using any monitoring agents. This approach allows customers to address Page 3

4 key monitoring challenges without increasing the management cost and creating additional burden on their infrastructure. Customers are using the same approach when leveraging Application Inspection Triggers, as no monitoring agents are required gain deep visibility into network and application performance. ExtraHop's technology allows customers an in-depth view into multiple IT domains, as the company's monitoring capabilities span from Layer two to Layer seven. This capability allows customers to use a single platform to monitor different elements of application delivery chain and, therefore, improve their ability to isolate infrastructure elements that are causing issues with the quality of user experience. In return, customers are able to reduce both the labor cost for managing IT performance, as well as the cost of managing IT technologies. ExtraHop is one of the few technology vendors that provides a management solution that can truly support 10Gb links. This has been one of the key reasons for the company's growth and a major competitive differentiator. As organizations are increasingly being tasked with managing "Big Data" and relying on bandwidth-intensive applications to support new business services, many of them are upgrading their networks to 10Gb/s capacity. While many organizations are reporting that the network performance management tools that they have in place are not as effective when deployed on 10Gb networks, ExtraHop has shown that it is able to support these environments. Summary and key takeaways ExtraHop's Application Inspection Triggers is taking an innovative approach for dealing with one of the key challenges of application performance: improving usability of application performance data. The technology offers a framework of customizable event-processing analysis at the application-protocol level that allows for a unique level of customization of real-time network and application performance management. By allowing customers to create custom views into application performance management data and generate these reports in real-time, the solution allows customers to be ensured that information they are accessing is truly relevant for their specific needs. The technology also offers IT personnel the ability to customize business-critical APM on the fly, without expending the resources necessary for agent-based technology. This reduces management costs associated with deployment and configuration, while giving precise visibility into process-point transaction interaction. Page 4

5 TRAC Research is a business-to-business (B2B) market research and analyst company that specializes in IT performance management. The company s research approach is based on four key attributes of true market research: Trusted, Relevant, Actionable and Credible. Our mission is to facilitate open conversations between technology vendors and end-users centered around unbiased, primary market research. Areas of coverage include: managing application performance over the WAN, application performance monitoring, Business Service Management (BSM), network monitoring, end-user experience monitoring, application delivery, managed network services, virtualization management, Cloud management and data center management. For more information about TRAC Research visit Page 5