When choosing an Application Performance Management (APM) provider to complement your log analytics solution, it is important to consider factors such as ease of integration, breadth of features offered and alignment with your growing business needs. APM solutions are metrics focused, they do a great job of identifying latency spikes, drop offs in user interaction, and other metrics based issues. However, they can’t always identify the root cause of a problem or detect complex anomalies such as new error types in applications. Together, APM and log analytics solutions provide end-to-end visibility into your application stack. This post aims to provide some insight into the features and integrations that various APM providers offer with log analytics solutions. The APM vendors are listed in random order, not by any specific ranking.
New Relic provides a SaaS based APM solution aimed at businesses with apps of all sizes. The APM solution provided by New Relic supports applications built on Ruby, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, iOS and Android. The base APM solution integrates with their other solutions providing metrics based analytics from browsers, mobile platforms and synthetic testing monitors (in beta). New Relic was named as a leader in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for APM.
Key Features:
- Code level visibility
- Transaction tracing
- SQL query analysis
- Alerting integrations with HipChat, Jira, PagerDuty and Campfire
- Network request tracking
- SLA compliance reporting
- Mobile: Crash reporting
- Mobile: Device analytics
- Synthetic monitoring integration
Pricing Tiers:
Base:
- 14 day free Pro trial
- Lite – 24hr data retention
- Pro – unlimited data retention, transaction tracing, phone support, and service SLA
- Enterprise – dedicated account manager, greater support
Mobile:
- Lite – 24hr data retention, summary data
- Standard – 1 week data retention, response time metrics, user interaction overview
- Enterprise – 3 month data retention, device metrics, user interaction traces
New Relic provides iPhone and Android applications where customers can view and receive alerts for important metrics, and on the web, New Relic offers a slick dashboard experience for looking into real-time application performance.
AppNeta provides a SaaS base APM solution that supports applications written in Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Node.js and Ruby. AppNeta was named as a niche player in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for APM.
Key Features:
- Synthetic monitoring
- Code level visibility
- Transaction tracing
- SLA Compliance Reporting
Pricing Tiers:
TraceView (APM solution):
- Free – 1 application, 1 hour of data retention, 1 user
- Startup – 1 application, 24 hours of data retention, 3 users
- Enterprise – unlimited applications, 45 days retention, unlimited users
AppView (Synthetic monitoring):
- Small – 5 monitors
- Medium – 10 monitors
- Large – 40 monitors
AppNeta’s heat-map charting interface makes it very intuitive and easy to spot patterns, trends, and outliers in your apps metrics.
AppDynamics focuses on providing a SaaS application performance management solution to both large and small businesses, and they offer support for Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, iOS and Android. They offer add ons that providing metrics based analytics from browsers and mobile platforms. Gartner named AppDynamics as a leader in the 2014 Magic Quadrant for APM.
Key Features:
- Realtime user monitoring
- Network request snapshots
- Alerting integrations with Service Now, Pager Duty, and Jira
- Code level visibility
- Mobile: Crash reporting
- Mobile: Device analytics
- Synthetic monitoring
Pricing Tiers:
Note: Pricing is done in units. Units are usually 1 process each, except for with node.js where 10 processes equal 1 unit.
Base:
- Lite – 24hr data retention, one unit
- Pro – upto 10 units
AppDynamics’ dashboards allow for the creation of visually appealing and robust application component maps that show the detailed breakdown of your application’s performance in real time.
The APM solution delivered by CA Technologies is delivered as a standalone software appliance. It has support for applications written in PHP, Java, and .NET. Named as a visionary in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for APM.
Key Features:
- Transaction tracing
- Browser response time monitoring
- Synthetic Monitoring
- Application behavior analytics
Pricing Tiers:
- Contact sales
CA’s application behavior analytics proactively monitors and analyzes metrics for trends and anomalies across all metrics to help identify problems that might not have been noticed otherwise.
Riverbed provides an APM solution aimed at companies that desire a self hosted APM appliance. Their AppInternals software can collect performance metrics from Java, .NET, all major browsers, iOS and Android. Riverbed was named as a visionary in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for APM.
Key Features:
- Transaction tracing
- Mobile: Device analytics
- SLA compliance reporting
- Integrates into Visual Studio and Eclipse
Pricing Tiers:
- Contact sales
In the latest release, Riverbed’s AppInternals added support for the querying and extended storage of single second granularity metrics. Support was also added for the monitoring of transactions occurring across AJAX requests.
Compuware’s APM solution is delivered as a self-hosted downloadable application. The dynaTrace APM can collect metrics from Java, .NET, PHP, SAP, Citrix and Oracle, and mobile applications. Named as a leader in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for APM.
Key Features:
- Transaction tracing
- SLA Compliance Reporting
- Mobile: Device Analytics
- Code level visibility
- Synthetic monitoring
Pricing Tiers:
- Free trial – 30 days
- Contact Sales for long term plans
Compuware not only supports custom built applications, but also provides robust integrations with established enterprise applications making it an attractive choice for companies needing a single APM solution to manage both large internal and external applications.
Choosing the right APM provider is important, but even the best APM solutions can’t always pinpoint the exact cause of issues originating in databases, network appliances, or other backend services. Using a log analytics service like Sumo Logic in conjunction with a top notch APM solution allows you to have end to end monitoring and analytics, and reduce your mean time to resolution even further. A fully comprehensive solution incorporating your APM solution and Sumo Logic will help you and your team spend less time fixing bugs and more time delighting customers.
