AppFirst Clinches Judges and Audience Choice Honors at Under the Radar

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Steve Pessah

Named Application Development and Management Category Winner

NEW YORK – April 22, 2010 – AppFirst, the only provider of real-time, proactive monitoring solutions, was chosen as both Judges’ and Audience Choice at Under the Radar in the Application Development and Management category. The company unveiled AppFirst Professional Edition, the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based application performance monitoring solution that can provide unique visibility into an entire application – regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers) at the event last week in Mountain View, CA. AppFirst enables SaaS IT operations to proactively monitor applications, driving down the cost of operations, see changes before they become problems and improve customer satisfaction.

“AppFirst is dedicated to delighting customers by providing them complete insight into how their applications are behaving on the infrastructure,” said David Roth, CEO and co-founder for AppFirst. “We’re honored to be selected as winners by the esteemed judges and our peers.”

AppFirst was selected to present at Under the Radar: Commercializing the Cloud. In its 16^th series, the conference showcases the best of breed technology startups in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem. Judges include CIOs, CTOs and IT executives from Bank of America, ING, MTV, Digg, Intuit, Salesforce, Rackspace and more. Under the Radar is designed to connect CEOs, technology executives, investors, analysts and press together with one ultimate goal: to get the deal done. A complete list of winners can be found at http://www.undertheradarblog.com/blog/announcing-under-the-radar-winners-who-….

“Under the Radar showcases innovative startups with the intention of introducing them to potential customers and partners,” noted Debbie Landa, CEO and Founder for DealMaker Media, producer of Under the Radar. “We take months to carefully select companies to participate at Under the Radar, therefore winning the recognition of the judges and audience, like AppFirst did, says a lot.”

About AppFirst, Inc.

AppFirst delivers a SaaS-based application performance management solution uniquely providing IT operations 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). Visibility into the executing application enables proactive monitoring to drive down cost of operations, see changes before they become problems and reduce customer churn. Founded in 2009, AppFirst is a New York City-based company venture backed by FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital. More information is available at www.appfirst.com.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

AppFirst Launches First SaaS-Based Application Performance Monitoring Solution for Entire Application

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Steve Pessah

SaaS IT Operations Go from Reactive to Proactive with AppFirst

Direct View of Application Execution Environment Offers Advanced Monitoring Capabilities for Improved Performance, Satisfaction and Costs

NEW YORK and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – April 16, 2010 – AppFirst today announced the immediate availability of AppFirst Professional Edition, the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based application performance monitoring solution, at the Under the Radar: Commercializing the Cloud event in Mountain View, Calif. With only one piece of software users are provided unique visibility into an entire application – regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers). AppFirst enables SaaS IT operations to proactively monitor applications, driving down the cost of operations, see changes before they become problems and improve customer satisfaction.

Using patent-pending technology AppFirst delivers a real-time view of applications as they execute. There are no limitations on language or application components such as databases, application servers or web servers. The application execution model — the view of the application as it is running on the physical infrastructure — has never been visualized before. Without that real-time view, IT operations is constantly in reactive mode. In SaaS organizations where the application is the business it is critical to be proactive and see changes before they become issues.

“We need AppFirst to put the right operational controls in place,” said Rick Nucci, CTO for Boomi. “It provides a proactive monitoring solution that links to usage of our application so we can capacity plan effectively to ensure we are ahead of our customers needs.”

AppFirst Professional Edition includes:

Dashboard – clear visibility into any changes in the executing application
Alert Management – immediate notification when user defined thresholds are reached
Data Flow – visualization of network connections and flow of information between application servers across servers that run applications
Data Insight — detailed data of executing applications, compare time frames to understand changes in the executing application
Capacity Planning – maximum efficiency at minimum cost, ensuring applications have all necessary resources

“Applications have always been difficult to manage and now are more complex with the movement to the cloud,” said David Roth, CEO and co-founder, AppFirst. “AppFirst is the first application performance monitoring solution that opens up the application black box, enabling SaaS IT operations to finally manage applications and deliver on the promise of software that works.”

AppFirst was selected to present at Under the Radar: Commercializing the Cloud. In its 16th series, the conference showcases the best of breed technology startups in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem. Judges include CIOs, CTOs and IT executives from Bank of America, ING, MTV, Digg, Intuit, Salesforce, Rackspace and more. Under the Radar is designed to connect CEOs, technology executives, investors, analysts and press together with one ultimate goal: to get the deal done.

AppFirst Professional Edition is available for free for 30 days. After the initial trial period, subscription pricing for four or more servers is $30 per server per month.

About AppFirst, Inc.

AppFirst delivers a SaaS-based application performance management solution uniquely providing IT operations 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). Visibility into the executing application enables proactive monitoring to drive down cost of operations, see changes before they become problems and reduce customer churn. Founded in 2009, AppFirst is a New York City-based company backed by FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital. More information is available at www.appfirst.com.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

3 Views of your Application

Posted on April 14, 2010 by Steve Pessah

If you are part of the 95% of the rest of us you are missing the critical 3rd view of your application. I’m getting ahead of myself. To say that that you may or may not be missing a view of your application implies that there is more than one view of an application. So, what is a view? It’s not complicated; it’s simply the way you think of your application, the picture in your head about what the app is and how it works, that’s your view of the application.

There are numerous tools available that allow you to view your application. After all, monitoring has been around for a long time. The challenge is to use a view that matches the way you think about and approach your application. This probably seems more than a bit abstract. Let’s make it concrete. If you are a developer you more than likely think about your application in terms of code; classes, objects, methods, SQL statements. If you are an IT operations person you likely think about your application in terms of services that execute in a specific infrastructure. So, there you have it, the first two views of an app; 1) code based and 2) infrastructure based.

Where does the 3rd view come from? OK, bear with me. Here it is.

There are a select few organizations that have obtained a high degree of operational excellence. Any way you want to measure it these select organizations are in a category that few of us have attained. Their density, servers to number of users, is amazing. Their uptime is so good that it is big news when something does go down. The cost of operations to the business has become a big time competitive advantage.

What’s the difference? Why do a few organizations get it so right and the rest of us just don’t? Maybe you feel you have got it right and attained a high degree of operational excellence. Maybe you have. However, the statistics aren’t in your favor. The reality is, most organization have not attained a substantial measure of operational excellence.

If you look into a few of these highly successful IT operations a few things stand out. First, they own all the same tools you do, and more. Yet, they have spent $Ms to customize their apps and their operations environment to provide data they don’t get by any other means, including all of the monitoring tools they own. The other aspect that stands out is the visualization of their custom data in ways that make sense to their environment.

You guessed it. Enter the 3rd view. The organizations that have obtained a significant measure of operational excellence have something in common. That is, they all use an additional view of the application. They have had to build custom tools and impose very proscriptive development methods to create this 3rd view. But they all consider it to be critical.

The 3rd view gives ops people a visualization of how apps physically execute. It’s not a code view. I heard a guy describe it as a mirror image of the code view. Kind of cool. That seems like a good way to think of it. The 3rd view describes the conceptual organization of an app. The focus is on resources, but not from a server or OS. The focus is resources per process. Any and all apps decompose to a collection of processes where each process owns resources. Therefore, the 3rd view allows you to visualize your apps as a collection of processes and examine the behavior of one or more process at a time.

And finally, the select few have created visualization that is oriented to their specific environment. If your environment is organized as pods with app server, business logic and dbase per pod, for example, then you would naturally want to visualize your app from the perspective of pods; as a collection of pods. In order to accomplish this you would want to create logical groupings that make sense to you. A natural grouping might be the way you think of your environment, a collection of web servers, a database cluster and so forth.

So there you have it; the missing 3rd view of your application. Do you need a 3rd view? Maybe. Maybe not. Know this though, the most successful IT operations on the planet rely heavily on the 3rd view and have invested $Ms to create it.

Introducing AppFirst

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Steve Pessah

Welcome to the AppFirst blog. My name is David Roth and I am a founder and CEO of AppFirst, Inc. We have all seen the aggressive adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) along with applications leveraging Cloud Computing. What has this trend done? It has shifted the “Application Operations” burden; from set up to every detail ensuring it works, from the end user or corporate buyer to the ISV.

Beyond writing great software, ISV’s now need to learn how to deliver “operational excellence” specific to their application. If they don’t, the consequences will be stark, ranging from the loss of customers due to any performance issues, to the excess spend that occurs from over-provisioning because there is no visibility, to what each application component actually consumes from a production hardware resource perspective.

At AppFirst we have built, from the ground up, the best IT Operations solution for SaaS by a SaaS company (and yes we are users of our software). To ensure we address real problems that stand in the way of building the best-in-class SaaS IT operations solution, we reached out to small, medium and some of the largest SaaS companies. It was unanimous; there was not a single commercial solution in the market that can help SaaS IT Operationsgain proactive monitoring to drive the best user experience at the lowest operational cost.

There are a handful of “elite” large-scale SaaS companies that have achieved operational excellence. After buying the best of what was on the market they had to proceed to invest in expensive code instrumentation and custom build their own monitoring solutions to gain the insight that was missing. There are two fundamental problems with this; first, this custom build approach defocuses valuable R&D resources on operational software instead of directing that investment to further innovation on their core business. Second, over 90% of the SaaS market can not afford to invest in this customization burden. At AppFirst we are passionate about democratizing our solution so that all SaaS IT operations can deliver the winning experience of their software while driving down their cost of operation.

A special thank you needs to be expressed to all of our Design Partners that have articulated the challenges that get in their way of achieving “operational excellence”.

Here were the top requests:

– “Tell me when any part of my distributed application is trending to a poor user experience before the system lights go red (servers down) or worse that my customer knows about a problem before I do.”

– “Tell me the resource consumption of each application component, with real time data over time to allow me to effectively plan the capacity I need for new customer growth without paying more than I need.”

So how do we enable this change to empower the SaaS IT operations leaders? Simply there are three key characteristics that have one thing in common; they solve the Application Data Collection Problem, which has plagued application-monitoring vendors for a decade or more. The next post will shed some light on that….