AppFirst is offering a free server monitoring service. Founded in 2009, the New York City-based company says its monitoring service provides IT operations with complete visibility into the behavior and performance of applications across the entire application stack, regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers).
The company says its stripped-down free version, AppFirst Basic, is superior to existing server monitoring products, including new cloud monitoring products, that are based upon interval or polling data collection. AppFirst says it delivers better server monitoring for physical, virtual and cloud servers by being proactive. Its Deterministic Root Cause feature delivers alerts to users that identify the exact server where an issue is occurring, the process on the server causing the issue and what specifically the process is doing to disturb the performance of the application. Furthermore, by automating the manual process of searching every tier of an application and every layer of the IT infrastructure to identify the source, hours, days and even weeks of time resolving performance issues are eliminated.
Bojan Simic, president and principal analyst,TRAC Research, says the new tool should be attractive, especially to the small-medium business market. The SMB market has been underserved, he said, and they've been forced to use tools that were an awkward fit, at best. "So the pricing (free), capability and ease of use should really have a good chance at the SMB market."
One of the attractions of AppFirst's approach to monitoring servers and applications is that it is done in real time, says Simic. The existing ways of dealing with a problem just doesn't work anymore, he says. "If the end user calls a help disk or files a trouble ticket, you're already losing. You should be able to fix it before it actually disrupts things."
With AppFirst, you get an alert when it looks like a problem might happen, not when it's already happened. Instead of spending a lot of time and resources on finger pointing and determining what is responsible, you know where and what the problem is, says Simic. "So it's a money saver, saving time and resources."
