AppNeta Offers Monitoring Solutions for Microservices at Scale

If an enterprise is running system-critical applications, chances are it has a monitoring solution running somewhere in its infrastructure or workflow pipeline. At the most basic level, monitoring begins with system-level resource utilization monitoring. However, if this technology is not aware of containers distributed across a system, it can become difficult to assess the true impact of how system resources are restraining containerized applications.

AppNeta has taken a unique approach to how enterprises gain insight into their host and system metrics, particularly those working with containers. Applications can have issues which have little to do with resource availability, such as latency, underlying errors, and other problems. Addressing these requires an application performance monitoring tool to be able to address and trace these issues across one’s stack.

Monitoring Insights Streamlined

“Monitoring just production environments is ultimately a reactive measure whereas adding pre-production monitoring can provide insight for developers,” said Dan Kuebrich, AppNeta chief technology officer.

By implementing monitoring before code is deployed into production, developers can find issues before they negatively impact end users. AppNeta offers its users deep insight the full range of requests coming into their system through a fleet of products tailored to a variety of DevOps issues, meaning action can be taken at a moment’s notice.

When HubSpot was faced with the challenge of implementing a performance monitoring solution across its 200+application staging and production environments, the company turned to AppNeta.

AppNeta – Application Performance Dashboard

AppNeta is one of a number of companies offering container-based monitoring. Others include New Relic, SolarWinds, DataDog, and Zabbix. Both New Relic and Zabbix provide up-to-the-minute alerts alongside a variety of integration tools for the fully-scaled-out infrastructure. SolarWinds offers network and system monitoring alongside database management tools to its users which make it a strong choice for those collecting vast quantities of data with their monitoring efforts. DataDog offers a vast selection of turn-key application integration which makes it an ideal monitoring solution for the infrastructure built on connecting various APIs.

Getting Under the Hood

Powering AppNeta’s request tracker is an agent-based instrumentation which allows for requests to be tracked at the host, application, and web server levels of an application. “AppNeta can be installed automatically through automated deploy systems such as Chef and Puppet, or manually through apt-get and yum,” said Kuebrich.

After installing the software, users can define their custom applications based on their web server entry point to visualize the services in their environment. AppNeta also includes Real User Monitoring (RUM), Synthetic Transaction Monitoring, and network context to all requests traced within a system to provide a solid end-to-end visualization experience for its users.

AppNeta AppView: Synthetic Testing Chart

System and application visibility ultimately hinges on developers and Developer and operations teams having the ability to access, view, and act upon issues provided to them from an end-to-end monitoring system. By using software such as AppNeta’s, enterprises can gather performance details on their back-ends the user’s browser, and networks in between, and, as a result, become better equipped to address the many challenges they face when working with containerized applications at scale.

New Relic is a sponsor of The New Stack.

Feature image via Pixabay.