Keynote, ExtraHop Team To Offer More Complete App Performance Picture

Marrying their application performance management (APM) solutions, Keynote Systems and ExtraHop Networks can now offer a more complete view of how an application is performing as it traverses from the Web front end to the back end.

The two companies announced that they are partnering to offer a joint solution that includes synthetic and real-time transaction analysis to determine how well applications--particularly Web applications--perform during transactions. The partnership is built on Keynote Systems' OpenAPM strategy, which lets customers integrate trusted Keynote external Web site measurements with the internal APM solution of their choice, such as ExtraHop Networks' Application Delivery Assurance system.

ExtraHop Networks' system features a passive network appliance that is able to monitor up to 10 gigabits of traffic in real-time, thanks to the expertise ExtraHop Networks co-founders Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji gleaned during their tenures at F5 Networks, a network infrastructure provider of high-speed application delivery controllers and other products. ExtraHop Networks' appliance, which leverages the latest multicore technology, monitors and analyzes application transactions across the network, database and storage tiers to help IT and network administrators troubleshoot and fix problems without the need for network probes.

The appliance's features include the ability to auto-discover devices and perform TCP analysis, and the appliance comes with a built-in alerting engine. It also includes protocol modules that understand application wire protocols at the transaction level, the company says.

The new solution from the two companies also leverages Keynote Systems' service, which generates synthetic tests from more than 3,000 measurement computers and mobile devices in over 240 locations in 160 metropolitan areas around the world. These tests monitor performance across the Internet and into a client's environment. The service is designed to watch mobile and Internet content, applications and services as end users see them.When used together, Keynote System's service can detect high-latency conditions or errors that are affecting end-user experience, and then ExtraHop Networks can provide the information needed about back-end components that may be running slowly or failing. For example, the solution can identify persistent application failures and then help determine what is causing the failure--perhaps a database scheme that was improperly impacted during an update.

It can also help determine what's causing performance degradation and provide customers with regular load tests. The two companies say the solution is lightweight and easy to deploy, without the need for several engineers to install and get up and running.

Jim Frey, research director with analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates, says the two companies recognized the complementary nature of their two solutions. "It is a good alignment," he says. "They are better together than apart. ExtraHop is good at tying application performance to what is happening behind the scenes; KeyNote collects great data about application performance, but it stops at the Web server."

For now, the two product sets are not tightly integrated, which means that IT administrators will have to use two separate front-end Web-based interfaces to drill into the data each collects. But company executives say they do intend to look for ways to more tightly integrate their technologies, including creating the ability to combine reporting onto a single browser screen. The two companies have created synergies among their field sales and training support teams.