AppFirst offers basic server monitoring service for free

12.11.2010
Year-old start-up company AppFirst is trying to shake up the way IT administrators think not only about application performance management but also server monitoring in general.

The company offers a proactive monitoring service that uses a patent-pending technique for collecting performance data off of servers in real time, set at 20-second intervals by default but customizable, says Pamela Roussos, chief marketing officer at AppFirst. This compares to traditional poll-based server monitoring products that collect data at intervals of five minutes or longer.

"We won't miss any incident," she says.

With the AppFirst service, users download collectors for use on servers no matter whether they are physical, virtual or in the cloud. Sitting at the system call level, they capture and record all activity transpiring between the application and the operating system in real time. The overhead is almost negligible, Roussos says -- 0.6% on Linux systems and 1% on Windows servers.

"We watch running applications as they shoot across the entire application stack, and do that in a way that won't affect performance and agnostic to the language, components and databases in use," she explains.

What’s more, AppFirst inherits the output of data gathered via Nagios, the open source IT monitoring software, as well as the thousands of Microsoft-created Windows performance counters, Roussos says. It installs 50 Nagios plug-ins, and automatically will pick up output from any other of the 1,800 or so such plug-ins, she adds.