Tag: application performance management

Weaveworks Launches Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition Featuring Enhanced Container Management Functionality

On March 29, Weaveworks announced the launch of the Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition (EE) tier for its container and microservices management platform. Compatible with all major container platforms and orchestration frameworks, the Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition simplifies, streamlines and accelerates the deployment and ongoing operational management of container-based applications. Developers can use the Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition (EE) to manage application releases for container-based applications. Additionally, Weaveworks allows developers to visualize the inter-relationship between different containers and monitor application performance as it relates to either individual containers or amalgamations of containers. Moreover, the Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition gives developers the capability to monitor application performance as measured by a multitude of metrics and to subsequently perform root cause analytics to understand the drivers of performance degradation or improvement. The platform also empowers developers to connect containers via its networking functionality that enables the creation of secure networked relationships between containers.

The recently launched platform features the availability of incident management functionality marked by the ability to obtain a granular understanding of the nexus of root causes responsible for an incident, the history of similar incidents as well as dashboards that elaborate on the timing and impact of the incident. In addition, the Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition (EE) boasts release automation functionality as well as the ability to roll-back releases to earlier points in time. Furthermore, the Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition (EE) features advanced analytics for the troubleshooting of Kubernetes that includes resource container mappings. Taken together with the delivery of its container management functionality via the cloud, the Weave Could Enterprise Edition empowers developers to focus on monitoring and improving container-based applications without the hassle of attention to the underlying infrastructure in which the containers are hosted.

The availability of incident management, release automation and Kubernetes troubleshooting functionality in this version of the Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition (EE) bolsters its positioning within the container management space by delivering enterprise-grade functionality that enable enterprises to track metadata associated with container-based applications and automate application releases.  But the larger story, here, is the narrative of an enterprise-grade container management platform that delivers on its promise of monitoring as well as ongoing operational management of container-based applications and infrastructures. Notable about Weaveworks is the sophistication of its advanced analytic capabilities for troubleshooting performance issues in container-based applications in conjunction with its unique visualization and secure networking capabilities for container-based infrastructures. As such, the platform differentiates in the container-management space by way of an end to end container management solution with strengths in monitoring and ongoing operational management.

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Datadog Announces Release Of Application Performance Management Solution Tailored For Cloud, Microservices and Container-based Apps

On September 21, Datadog announced the release of an Application Performance Management product to its core SaaS product for monitoring cloud infrastructures. Datadog’s Application Performance Management solution is designed to help developers understand and optimize application performance, with a specific focus on applications hosted in hybrid cloud, container or micro-services infrastructures. Datadog’s experience in infrastructure monitoring positions it strongly to enter an application performance management space featuring the likes of New Relic and AppDynamics. Moreover, the company’s expertise in monitoring cloud-based infrastructures renders it uniquely qualified to manage application performance on cloud platforms given the intersection between infrastructure and application performance as noted below by Datadog’s Chief Product Officer, Amit Agarwal:

Most APM tools on the market today are designed to troubleshoot coding issues in isolation. However, in modern cloud-scale applications, quickly resolving problems requires examining changes in both the infrastructure and code simultaneously.

Here, Agarwal remarks on the importance of examining application-related issues within the broader context of the infrastructure on which applications run. Application-related performance bottlenecks or other “coding issues,” Agarwal notes, should no longer be understood separately from their associated infrastructure components and instead require a framework that facilitates a holistic analysis of their root causes with attention to both the application and infrastructure layers. Given the dynamism specific to cloud computing infrastructures as evinced by instances, clusters and containers that are variously launched, spun down or assume different relationships with one another, Datadog’s specialization in cloud infrastructure monitoring and analytics positions it to take a leadership position in the application monitoring space, particularly given the proliferation of cloud-based applications and the concomitant inability of legacy application performance management frameworks to understand how the dynamic quality of cloud infrastructures variously impacts cloud application performance. Separate from its experience with cloud infrastructure monitoring, Datadog brings rich data visualization capabilities to the conversation about application performance management in addition to battle-tested analytics that take advantage of time-series analyses, correlative analytics and predictive analytics as illustrated below:

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With $94.5M in Series D funding raised in January, and a whopping $148M in total funding raised to date, expect Datadog to richly build out its application performance management capabilities in conjunction with the progressive expansion of the adoption of its cloud monitoring platform. Meanwhile, Datadog’s release of its application performance management solution signals the intensification of a larger battle in the industry to build and refine a comprehensive infrastructure and application monitoring framework capable of managing the radical heterogeneity of infrastructures, applications, databases and orchestration frameworks specific to contemporary computing.

New Relic Joins Hortonworks In Week Of $100M Tech IPOs

This week, application performance management vendor New Relic announced it had filed an S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a step toward executing an initial public offering of its common stock aimed at raising roughly $100M. The IPO will be underwritten by Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Allen & Company and UBS in collaboration with JMP Securities and Raymond James & Associates. While the precise number of shares and their initial share price remains to be determined, New Relic revealed plans to trade shares under the stock ticker symbol NEWR. For the fiscal year 2014, New Relic has raised $215M in capital to date, with its most recent capital raise occurring in April 2014 in a round that raised $100M led by BlackRock, Inc. and Passport Capital, LLC. New Relic registered a loss of $40.2M on $63.2M in revenue. From September 30, 2013 to September 30, 2014, New Relic’s employee headcount increased from 315 to 534 while its total number of paying customers correspondingly increased from 7,552 to 10,590 over the same time period.

New Relic’s IPO announcement marks the second company this week in which Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton sits on the board of directors to seek $100M in IPO funding. Earlier this week, Hadoop vendor Hortonworks announced that it had similarly filed an S-1 for an IPO this Monday. New Relic’s S-1 filing lists HP, IBM, Oracle, BMC Software, SAP, AppDynamics, Splunk, Google and Webtrends amongst its competitors. New Relic’s announcement of its decision to pursue an IPO constitutes a watershed moment in enterprise IT insofar as its SaaS-based application performance management (APM) software claims deep integration with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine. New Relic’s success in building analytics and performance management platforms for cloud-based infrastructures renders it an increasingly important fixture in enterprise IT, particularly as cloud adoption continues to accelerate throughout the enterprise.

Concurrent Releases Driven, First Big Data Application Performance Management Solution

Concurrent Inc., the primary sponsor behind Cascading, today announces the release of Driven, an application performance management solution for Big Data applications. Driven enables developers to quickly identify and remediate application failures and performance issues specific to applications built using Hadoop. Available as a plug-in for the Cascading infrastructure, Driven solves a key problem in the Hadoop industry related to the management of Hadoop-based applications. The use of Driven allows developers to confirm the successful execution of application jobs and data processing algorithms, in addition to facilitating the optimization of application performance. Developers can monitor and trend application metrics such as runtime parallelization for both operational and R&D purposes. Moreover, because Driven is part of the Java-based Cascading framework for building analytics and data management applications on Apache Hadoop, Driven users can take advantage of Cascading’s collaboration functionality to communicate with Driven communities all over the world.

Chris Wensel, founder and CTO, Concurrent, Inc., remarked on the significance of Driven as follows:

Driven is a powerful step forward in delivering on the full promise of connecting business with Big Data. Gone are the days when developers must dig through log files for clues to slow performance or failures of their data processing applications. The release of Driven further enables enterprise users to develop data oriented applications on Apache Hadoop in a more collaborative, streamlined fashion. Driven is the key to unlock enterprises’ ability to drive differentiation through data. There’s a lot more to come – this is only the beginning.

Here, Wensel notes the way in which Driven responds to the opacity of Hadoop by providing developers with an alternative to sloughing through volumes of log files to understand the performance of their applications. Concurrent CEO Gary Nakamura elaborated on Wensel’s remarks by noting that “One of the big problems in Hadoop today is it’s just a black box,” and that Driven provides a way to expeditiously navigate to lines of code that are responsible for application failure. Because of its positioning as part of the Cascading infrastructure, Driven stands to significantly enhance the value of Cascading by providing developers with an extra layer of insight into application performance that complements Cascading’s indigenous framework for big data analytics and data management. Expect Driven to vault the status of Cascading within the Big Data industry even further and ultimately confirm its place as the go to application for Hadoop analytics, data and application management. Driven is currently available in public Beta whereas its commercial variant, Driven Enterprise, will be available in Q2 via an annual subscription.

Cloudmeter’s Big Data Network Analytics Enables Integrated Application Performance Management

Cloudmeter today announces the general availability of Cloudmeter Stream, a non-invasive platform that enables customers to transform Big Data streams of network data into actionable business intelligence. Cloudmeter also announces the early access availability of Cloudmeter Insight, a SaaS application that integrates back-end network analytics with front-end marketing analytics to deliver integrated data regarding user experiences of application platforms. Together, Cloudmeter Stream and Cloudmeter Insight expand the purview of Big Data analytics to network data and enable customers to obtain a 360 degree view of user interactions with their products. Both Cloudmeter Stream and Cloudmeter Insight allow access to network data without risks of physical disruption to network infrastructures.

Cloudmeter’s analytics represent an extension of the DevOps movement by allowing operations to more effectively understand the impact of IT infrastructure on end-user experiences. Application owners can use Cloudmeter to effectively configure business rules to determine which network data attributes constitute fields of interest. For example, customers can create business rules that identify session errors, network traffic on specific servers or data regarding the elapsed time between specific interactions with the platform. Users create business rules and manage the application more generally using an intuitive user interface featuring screens such as the following:

Cloudmeter CEO Mike Dickey remarked on the innovation represented by the platform for capturing network data by noting:

Our new data capture technology is a culmination of many years of experience building network-based data capture products. It enables customers to gain real time access into the wealth of business and IT information without the need to connect to physical network infrastructure, and without introducing risk to production systems or application performance.

Dickey underscores how Cloudmeter’s technology brings the Big Data revolution to network data and concomitantly empowers customers to access “business and IT information” in ways that have the potential to transform both their marketing platforms as well as their IT infrastructure design. In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, Cloudmeter’s COO Ronit Belson remarked that, rather than falling into the category of DevOps products, the company’s platform more appropriately represents a disruptive innovation in the MarkOps space defined by the integration of marketing-related front-end application design with the Operations-related design of their platform’s IT infrastructure. Cloudmeter Stream integrates with Big Data platforms such as Splunk and GoodData allowing users to integrate petabytes of machine data with data selectively culled from the business rules specific to Cloudmeter’s user interface.

Cloudmeter Stream is complemented by Cloudmeter Insight, a SaaS application that transforms data captured by Cloudmeter Insight into visual representations that allow application owners to comprehensively understand end-user experiences of an application as represented below:

Cloudmeter Stream leverages widgets to allow users to customize reports and dashboards of their choosing. The result is an integrated view of an application’s backend and front-end user experience in ways that allow application owners to obtain a truly holistic picture of user experiences with their platforms. Today’s announcements point toward two exciting new releases into the application performance management space as Big Data begins to own up to its potential of delivering 360 degree views of user experiences with technology platforms. Cloudmeter’s customer base includes Netflix, SAP and Saks Fifth Avenue and 1-800-Flowers.