ExtraHop wins five-vendor application performance monitoring shoot-out When users complain that an application is slow or when customers abandon online sessions without buying anything, the cause of the problem is often elusive and mysterious. You know that the network connections are tight and the servers are humming, but the problem persists. Troubleshooting efforts degenerate into finger-pointing. One vendor suggests spending money on faster computers. Someone invariably says the software needs to be completely rewritten. Another vendor sagely recommends faster storage devices. Yet another says you need more bandwidth. What’s a network executive to do? The answer: Try an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool. An APM tool monitors a multi-tier application’s performance and availability to show exactly how much time each application component takes to respond to a user’s requests. The information helps you decide what network or computing environment changes to make to solve the problem. + ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD 26 helpful open source network management tools + The perfect APM tool would have the following capabilities: Discovers and enumerates applications, devices and computers Supports a variety of applications, servers and devices Integrates with a global directory Graphically depicts the network Monitors application availability, performance and health Identifies and analyzes problems Produces alerts and notifications Issues trouble tickets (or integrates with a help desk tool) Supports virtualized environments and clouds Produces useful, informative reports We invited APM tool vendors to submit products to our Alabama lab for evaluation. Five vendors participated. ExtraHop sent its Application Delivery Assurance (ADA) 3.9 EH6000 appliance, Dell shipped its FogLight 5.9.1 appliance and Fluke Networks loaned us a Visual TruView 1.3 appliance. We downloaded BlueStripe’s FactFinder 7.2 and the virtual machine edition of BMC’s Real End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) 2.0. (Watch a slideshow version of this story.) While all the tools exhibited a range of APM strengths and abilities, we found that ExtraHop’s appliance did the best job of keeping our users’ performance complaints to a minimum. It was quickest to identify performance problems, its display of application activity was easiest to use and it had the best virtual machine support. BMC EUEM’s endpoint- and session-oriented transaction analysis quickly and accurately spotted our bottlenecks, but EUEM required that we license a number of other vendors’ products, and it lacked a high level of support for virtual computing and public clouds. While Dell FogLight excelled at tracking database transaction performance and had comprehensive analysis tools, configuring FogLight was tedious. Although Fluke Networks’ Visual TruView revealed great volumes of network performance detail, it was packet-centric and technically demanding. BlueStripe FactFinder accurately mapped transaction paths, graphically charted real-time app service levels, issued alerts and analyzed root causes. Unfortunately, BlueStripe FactFinder lost points for being agent based. Technology IndustryApp TestingUtilities