New AppFirst Monitoring Product Integrates With Top Cloud Providers

AppFirst, a company that provides detailed monitoring and management of computing resources running in cloud environments, has introduced a new version of its solution that integrates with the systems of major cloud providers. The company announced this week that its AppFirst system--which constantly, rather than intermittently, monitors performance-- works with cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, SoftLayer and GoGrid, and will support additional cloud providers in the near future.

David Roth, president and CEO of AppFirst, says that the company's solution differs from other performance monitoring services because it constantly monitors system performance. Many others, in contrast, monitor only by "polling," meaning that they check system performance only occasionally. "If your monitoring asks a SQL database for specific information, you're going to get that information, but if the something that is going wrong is right above or below that information, it's not going to look for it. It was programmed to only ask that specific question," Roth says.

AppFirst Basic is a free monitoring service for monitoring, adding, removing and otherwise managing cloud server instances. AppFirst Professional is a paid product with more robust features, according to Roth. The company also offers customized monitoring and management solutions.

Cloud service provider Rackspace announced its acquisition of Cloudkick, a comprehensive cloud monitoring company, on Dec. 16. It is a move that Roth says validates the cloud management and monitoring space that AppFirst is in. Bernd Harzog, an independent industry analyst, refers to this category of application as monitoring as a service (MaaS).

"If cloud vendors want to attract more than the most tactical/development-oriented workloads, they need to offer two levels of performance assurance that they do not, for the most part, offer today," Harzog wrote in a blog post Tuesday. Cloud vendors need to monitor and manage both infrastructure performance and application performance in order to best serve their customers.Harzog described AppFirst as having the best infrastructure MaaS solution on the market, particularly for multitenant cloud environments. Other players include Akorri, Xangati, Virtual Instruments and CA, whose product is called Virtual Assurance. Harzog identifies New Relic as an application performance management MaaS provider that supports Java, PHP, Ruby, and Microsoft .Net environments.

Harzog identifies New Relic as an application performance management MaaS provider that supports Java, PHP, Ruby, and Microsoft .Net environments. AppFirst also considers itself an APM based on a definition that differs from Harzog's. He defines APMs as vendors that operate in the run-time of various application programming languages, while AppFirst notes that it analyzes applications at the system level.

AppFirst has partnership agreements with Amazon, GoGrid and Rackspace, as well as one pending with SoftLayer. AppFirst also has deals with CloudSigma, a European cloud provider, and IBM.

Harzog downplayed the Cloudkick acquisition by Rackspace, saying that Cloudkick "provided nothing but commodity monitoring functionality as a service." He also doesn't see a trend of other acquisitions of monitoring services. He considers partnerships with cloud providers and companies like AppFirst more likely.

As cloud computing becomes more prevalent, customers need more assurance that they have control over IT resources that they can access through a cloud provider, says Roth. That concern about control is one of the impediments to wider adoption. "The common nature about IT is [cloud providers] finding out about problems from their users in a reactive fashion," he says. "And even when issues are found, they're lucky if they can solve them in days."