"We correlate this data with our information to provide a complete picture of what's going on in the entire application stack," she says. "Because we have a complete data set, we can see change happening easily and quickly and can alert to those changes immediately."

All of this, AppFirst believes, should be free to IT administrators. "What we figured is why should you be paying for things that aren’t really even serving your needs?" Roussos says.

Yes, IT administrators need to know when things are going amiss -- and that they can now get from the company's fre AppFirst Basic SaaS offering, which monitors servers and alerts upon problem discovery. But what they really need is a way to get to the root cause -- quickly and easily, she says.

And that AppFirst does via its fee-based Professional version, which provides deterministic root-cause analysis. "We can tell users what's going on in the server, with what process and what that process is doing to affect the performance of an application," Roussos says.

If IT administrators only need server monitoring, they’re free to use the Basic version for as long as they want. But the minute they need help with root-cause analysis, they can switch to the Professional version via an easy account status change in their management consoles and credit-card entry, she says.