We’re very proud and excited to be one of the initial partners for OpSource’s Validated Cloud Solutions Program. Congrats to them and their entire team on the launch. If you’re running in the OpSource Cloud, make sure to check us out.
To read more, you can check out the OpSource Press Release here.
Yes, the above heading is correct. At around 9:30 AM EST, on the 19th of August, 2011, a Sandbox user went in and deleted all of our Application associations, causing a load issue with one of our production systems. Sand was thrown, castles were destroyed, shovels and buckets were strewn everywhere.
It’s an unfortunate event that has happened. What was once a happy and joyful playground has now been covered and moved to a remote location. We enjoyed letting anyone come to our site and play with our product, but there was only one rule: Please don’t delete anything.
There’s a popular saying for these kind of things: one bad apple can spoil the bunch. Since day one, we’ve had our sandbox available to anyone who might stumble upon our website. Since that time (April of 2010), the sandbox account has racked up more than 1200 hours of user view time, which is a phenomenal number! We’ve been a “high-trust” company, and would like to continue to be. This is why we’d like to bring the sandbox back eventually. But first, we need to ensure that this can’t happen again.
Now if you’re someone who likes to find the positive side of things, here it is: we were alerted by our system that we were having an issue, we were able to find the exact cause of the issues we were having, resolve them, and get our systems back up and running in minutes! Because of how fast we were able to act, none of our users were affected. This means no unhappy customers, no flood of emails in your inbox, no money lost.
Going through something like this really shows the power of AppFirst. We pride ourselves on proactive problem resolution – finding issues before you hear about it from your users. Someone put us to our own test, and we aced it. You can do the same.
- The AppFirst Team
Yesterday AppFirst had the tremendous opportunity to demo at the Splunk User Conference (.conf2011) in support of the Developer Platform announcements that they recently made. Big thanks to Paul Sanford and Brad Lovering for their contributions! There are two scenarios for using AppFirst and Splunk together, which I’ll dive into below.
Scenario 1 is for Splunk customers. Paul sent us the Python SDK they’ve been working on, and in short order our development team (i.e., Taek Joo and Donn) had our collectors streaming data to Splunk, rather than to our backend. Using Splunk as a Platform, we can stream our complementary application behavior directly to Splunk, and Splunk users can use the existing interface they know so well to tease out the information they are looking for.
We demoed two use-cases for this scenario. How often do you need to decommission servers that aren’t being used, but don’t know where to start? We hear this frequently from customers—they don’t know which servers their applications depend on to run smoothly, because interdependencies between servers are difficult to map. Many customers have a mental model of these interdependencies, but don’t know for certain if that model reflects reality. If one wrong wire gets tripped, it could lead to disaster! One of the Splunk searches we created was identifying which IP addresses Membase accessed. Another search we created was to view the number of sockets, and the amount of CPU and memory being used when our frontend’s response time exceeded 1 second.
Scenario 2 gives AppFirst customers access to the power of Splunk search (we’re very excited about this!). In this case AppFirst customers, using our SaaS-based solution, will have access to Splunk data through the AppFirst UI, to search for specific information. When our collectors stream to our backend, we’ll do the processing and store data in Membase and Splunk for indexing. This feature is already in development. All that’s left is to surface Splunk search in our UI.
There were over 600 people attending the event yesterday. Based on the heat index in the room, it felt like almost all of them were in our breakout session. 
All in all, we were proud to be invited to participate in such an extremely popular event, and were thrilled for the opportunity to demonstrate the value-adding benefits of combining the Splunk Platform with AppFirst – a truly powerful combination!
New Features and Pricing Structure Enhance AppFirst Offerings
Server Tags, Log File Data Collection and Tiered Pricing Bring Miss Nothing Data Capabilities to Businesses of all Sizes
NEW YORK, NY – August 15, 2011 – AppFirst, the next generation application problem resolution system offering the highest data fidelity in the application performance monitoring market, today unveiled a host of new features and pricing changes in response to customers’ needs. Server tags and log file data access extend the flexibility of AppFirst’s Miss Nothing Data collection technology, while tiered pricing delivers four distinct offerings to support a wide range of requirements. The new version moves into production today, and pricing options are available immediately.
“Creating a tiered pricing structure allows us to deliver solutions for businesses of all shapes and sizes,” said David Roth, CEO of AppFirst. “At the same time, we continue to add new features that allow application architects and DevOps to offer the absolute best application performance and reliability to their customers.”
Log File Data and Server Tags
AppFirst now automatically collects log file data that can be correlated with the company’s Miss Nothing Data collection, along with other data sources such as Nagios and the Windows Performance Counter data. Users simply select which log files to collect, and the output can be viewed in AppFirst’s application log viewer.
The addition of server tags gives architects and DevOps a simple way to group similar servers into logical clusters for easier visualization and management. For example, production servers may need to be managed differently than quality assurance servers. The ability to tag servers and quickly set different alert thresholds for each group simplifies server performance management and delivers a powerful, proactive way to troubleshoot issues related to server utilization, server performance and configuration.
“As the number of servers in an organization grows, being able to organize them into related functions, while also easily setting individual thresholds based on use, is critical,” says AppFirst customer Andy Piggott, managing director for Software as a Service provider Incutio. “Our DevOps team would spend hours identifying log lines from applications following a system event. But with AppFirst, the relevant log data is already presented for analysis along with the event we are investigating, which saves us many man-hours per investigation.”
Other feature enhancements, including user-friendly host names and international SMS alerts, have also been added by AppFirst, as well as support for Fedora 14, CentOS 5.6 and 6.0, and Debian 6.0.
Four-Tier Pricing Structure
AppFirst has established four offerings to choose from depending on the customer’s size and needs. Small companies can take advantage of the “Three for Free” Developer program, which includes all the power of AppFirst with one week of data retention for three or fewer servers. The new Standard option, for .75 cents per server per hour (equivalent to $5.40 per server per month), is specifically designed for users who want to focus on monitoring and alerts. The Standard option offers capabilities including:
For customers who need monitor/alert capabilities, as well as troubleshooting and problem resolution capabilities, the Professional version, offered at a usage rate of 2.5 cents an hour or a bundled price of $49 a month, includes all Standard plan features as well as:
The company also offers custom plans for users requiring a Private Cloud for monitoring, management and problem resolution of their own private cloud.
About AppFirst, Inc.
AppFirst is the leading SaaS-based application problem resolution service designed to provide mid-market application architects and DevOps complete visibility into their applications across the entire application stack. AppFirst is an agnostic solution, supporting a wide range of applications, regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers) and incorporates its patent-pending Miss Nothing Data capability. This unique feature is designed to provide clear insight into executing applications and quickly correlate with other data sources, allowing a proactive approach where IT professionals can see changes before they become problems, reduce customer churn, and drive down the cost of operations. Founded in 2009, AppFirst is a New York City-based company venture backed by FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital. For more information, visit http://www.appfirst.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/appfirst or subscribe to the AppFirst blog to stay up-to-date on the latest AppFirst news.
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