Priced on a per-usage basis, AppFirst Professional costs 2.5 cents per hour, which translates to $18 per server monthly for constant 30-day use. With a 75-server bundle, that monthly price comes down to roughly $10 per server, adds Roussos, nothing that custom plans also are available for larger enterprises.

"AppFirst is filling two gaps in the market -- one is in the underserved SMB area, where there are a lot of point tools that mostly do network monitoring or higher-end solutions [that are too costly,] and the other is for companies trying to control the overhead of managing application performance,” says Bojan Simic, president of Trac Research.

"Between the combination of its capabilities, the price point and ease of use," he says, "AppFirst makes for an attractive application performance management offering."

in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.