Pete Abrams, chief operating officer of Instana
As companies continue to adopt a DevOps culture and embrace Agile methodologies, it has become painfully obvious that traditional monitoring can no longer keep pace with the complexity and scale of dynamic application environments run by modern enterprises. Software-defined businesses require solutions to protect them from outages and bad user experiences – which is exactly what we deliver to our customers across the globe.

APM enables software teams to monitor application performance and availability. Every time there is a fundamental change in the underlying application/infrastructure stack, a new opportunity arises.  The age of containers and Kubernetes is upon us and with it comes the latest opportunity to revolutionize APM.

Instana’s automatic APM solution includes:

  • Exceptional one second metric granularity and a distributed trace for every user request, the best in the industry
  • Continuous, and automatic, discovery, mapping and monitoring of all hosts and “apps” whether they are bare metal, virtual machines, or containers.
  • Automatic tracing for nine languages (including Java) and also as OpenTracing support
  • An AI approach to discovery, problem detection and troubleshooting made to handle the massive dynamic applications that result from modern architectures

With Instana, you’ll be able to deploy faster with confidence; confidence that you will know immediately if a performance regression has been introduced; confidence that your full infrastructure and application stack is monitored; confidence that you’ll be able to quickly resolve any incidents that arise over time.

Dennis Chu, director of product marketing at LightStep
LightStep [x]PM provides APM for today’s complex systems including microservices and serverless functions. [x]PM helps organizations running microservice architectures maintain control over their systems, so they can reduce MTTR during firefighting situations and make proactive application performance improvements.

[x]PM’s unique design allows it to analyze 100% of unsampled transaction data from highly-distributed, large-scale production software to produce meaningful distributed traces and metrics that explain performance behaviors and accelerate root cause analysis. In addition, [x]PM’s intuitive user experience makes it easy to discover, categorize, and explain distinct latency behaviors occurring throughout an application. Users can even visually compare current performance against past performance along any application dimensions, so at a glance it’s immediately clear whether the behavior being observed is normal or not. Finally, [x]PM follows entire transactions from clients making requests down to low-level services and back, revealing how every service interacted and responded to one another. [x]PM even automatically computes a transaction’s critical path, so users can quickly navigate to bottlenecks in the system.

Tal Weiss, CTO of OverOps
OverOps extends the traditional definition of application performance management to address the functional issues causing slowdowns and performance bottlenecks. This not only improves developer productivity but is critical for delivering reliable applications.

The typical APM workflow helps identify slowdowns, yet still relies on log data as the primary resource for troubleshooting their cause. Log files can be incredibly useful, but are not without limitations. While they can provide you with some information about what went wrong in your application, they lack significant context and depth. They also require the foresight to anticipate errors, but we’ve found that the most impactful errors are often unexpected. OverOps goes beyond logs to capture code-level insight about application quality across any environment, and give developers and operations teams deeper visibility into the root cause of application issues and performance slowdowns.

Without requiring code modifications or performance overhead, the OverOps agent collects a snapshot at the moment a timer threshold is exceeded or any error occurs––even those not logged. Each snapshot is analyzed and processed to extract code, contextual values of variables and the state of the virtual machine and physical host at the time of an issue. By combining static and dynamic code analysis, OverOps arms development and operations teams with everything from the full source code and state at the point of execution, to high-level stats around the health of new deployments and their impact on the overall application.

Amena Siddiqi, product marketing director of SteelCentral APM at Riverbed
Riverbed’s big data technology for APM is fully adapted to today’s hyperscale cloud-native applications, giving you complete insight, at any scale. It captures, stores and indexes across billions of transactions a day without sacrificing data completeness, granularity or depth. And its powerful analytics extract business-relevant insight so you never miss a performance problem.

With Riverbed, you can reconstruct incidents in great detail for immediate insight into even infrequent or intermittent issues, and quickly resolve problems before end users are impacted. Distributed transactions are traced from the end user down to deep levels of user code, even in overhead-sensitive enterprise production environments. Every diagnostic detail is preserved, including end user, log, SQL, network and payload data, along with fine-grained systems metrics, for unified visibility across the application ecosystem. This results in faster troubleshooting for even the toughest performance problems.

Riverbed provides full operational visibility into transactions, containers and microservices running on modern cloud-based application infrastructure, including: Docker, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, OpenStack, IBM Cloud, AWS and Azure. Easy to deploy and manage, its lightweight, non-intrusive instrumentation automatically discovers application components, containers and their relationships.

Riverbed’s APM solution, AppInternals, is part of Riverbed SteelCentral’s Digital Experience Management platform that unifies device-based user experience, application, infrastructure, and network monitoring to provide a holistic view of a user’s digital experience. This provides clear insights into how customers are consuming apps, what their digital experience is like, and how that experience directly impacts revenue, productivity, costs, and other business KPIs.