Category Archives: AppFirst Evolution

Our Story — The Evolution of AppFirst

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AppFirst started out like most companies do, as an idea: how to develop “Cloud Monitoring with Complete Visibility”—in this case. So it’s pretty incredible that just two months after CEO David Roth and partner/CTO Donn Rochette formed a Delaware C-Corp., AppFirst had already raised over a million dollars in seed funding.

Fast forward a year later to the summer of 2010, and AppFirst had an office cat, two top awards from Under the Radar (an innovation showcase and business development conference in Silicon Valley), and another $1.5M raised in a Seed Plus round—not to mention a pool of paying customers that depend on AppFirst’s unique solution for daily monitoring of computer infrastructure.

And now, two months into the new year, AppFirst currently monitors more than 250,000 processes a day. Our patent pending “inside out” visiblity in executing applications continues to enable proactive management to drive down cost of operations, see changes before they become problems, and reduce customer chrun.

But that’s not all. It initially took us nine months to reach the 10 million monitored processes mark. To reach our next goal of 20 million, it will only take us two.

That’s enough from us though. Our beautiful timeline will do the rest of the talking.

Af_timeline

To see for yourself, try out our product for free.

IT Operations has spoken and AppFirst is listening!

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We hear you loud and clear! You spend all of your time putting out fires and, with the big gap in monitoring tools, you’ll never get out of that mode.

It’s time to do better than “your father’s monitoring products.” System monitors only tell you the health of the physical or virtual box (with no insight to what’s inside). Application-specific probes and agents don’t paint a complete n-tier application picture. Byte-code analysis doesn’t see the entire application as it executes, and it focuses on finding code problems that lead to performance issues when, actually, the majority of IT Operations issues are due to non-code-specific changes in the infrastructure configuration or usage patterns. As you can see, there’s a huge gap of unaddressed monitoring needs for IT operations.

Until you can see your entire application stack as it executes in real time, you’ll still be settling for blind spots that lead to fire fighting and extended delays while you try to put out the fires.

With help and input from your IT peers, AppFirst has not only listened but has built the only Infrastructure Performance Management Solution that:

  • Visualizes your entire application stack as it executes
  • Captures the response times and detailed resource utilization profiles for every application
  • Automatically and continuously discovers and maps the topology of every application
  • Allows you to know with certainty what’s changing within your application and to use this insight to make smart infrastructure decisions to reduce performance issues and lower your costs
  • Works across Windows, Linux, physical deployments, virtual deployments and cloud deployments
  • Takes minutes to set up and provides instant value

What does all of this mean? AppFirst is delivering the industry’s first deterministic IT Infrastructure root cause analysis solution!By determining what has changed when slower than acceptable response times occur, we can provide IT with not only the complete view of the application stack, but also the depth to know in minutes all the information that has eluded IT without us.

Your time is valuable, your company’s cost of operations matters, and we are committed to your success in achieving your goals in these metrics.

IT Operations has spoken and AppFirst is listening!

Posted on by
10

We hear you loud and clear! You spend all of your time putting out fires and, with the big gap in monitoring tools, you’ll never get out of that mode.

It’s time to do better than “your father’s monitoring products.” System monitors only tell you the health of the physical or virtual box (with no insight to what’s inside). Application-specific probes and agents don’t paint a complete n-tier application picture. Byte-code analysis doesn’t see the entire application as it executes, and it focuses on finding code problems that lead to performance issues when, actually, the majority of IT Operations issues are due to non-code-specific changes in the infrastructure configuration or usage patterns. As you can see, there’s a huge gap of unaddressed monitoring needs for IT operations.

Until you can see your entire application stack as it executes in real time, you’ll still be settling for blind spots that lead to fire fighting and extended delays while you try to put out the fires.

With help and input from your IT peers, AppFirst has not only listened but has built the only Infrastructure Performance Management Solution that:

  • Visualizes your entire application stack as it executes
  • Captures the response times and detailed resource utilization profiles for every application
  • Automatically and continuously discovers and maps the topology of every application
  • Allows you to know with certainty what’s changing within your application and to use this insight to make smart infrastructure decisions to reduce performance issues and lower your costs
  • Works across Windows, Linux, physical deployments, virtual deployments and cloud deployments
  • Takes minutes to set up and provides instant value

What does all of this mean? AppFirst is delivering the industry’s first deterministic IT Infrastructure root cause analysis solution! By determining what has changed when slower than acceptable response times occur, we can provide IT with not only the complete view of the application stack, but also the depth to know in minutes all the information that has eluded IT without us.

Your time is valuable, your company’s cost of operations matters, and we are committed to your success in achieving your goals in these metrics.

Introducing AppFirst

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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….