Q&A with Colin Macnab, CEO and co-founder of AppEnsure

Can you tell us about AppEnsure and your most recent announcement?

AppEnsure is the first application management solution that automatically measures response time and throughput for all types of applications; custom developed and purchased, in physical, virtualized, public and private cloud environments. We recently announced the general availability of our application performance monitoring and management solutions, after a successful beta testing period.

Why is there a need for a product like AppEnsure?

With more companies adopting cloud infrastructures daily, the number of organizations moving from traditional physical infrastructures to cloud and virtualized environments has been steadily increasing. However, as the number of applications in these environments continues to grow, the root cause of performance issues are becoming difficult to pinpoint. This is due to limited operational visibility and ineffective legacy IT tools that do not have visibility of infrastructure in a virtualized computing environment or cloud. When applications slow down, end users do not have the tools to be productive, which leads to wasted time and often, a loss in revenue. We created AppEnsure to address these problems.

Tell us about how AppEnsure works.

AppEnsure provides App Ops with an application management solution that provides full traffic visibility, regardless of the type of application or environment. Its capabilities include automatic discovery of all applications and the topology mapping to the supporting infrastructure, in real-time. AppEnsure is able to quickly discover all types of applications by name and provide real-time, correlated, root cause analysis, providing actionable data when response time and throughput of an application declines. This enables IT to focus on proactively maintaining SLA’s and business performance, instead of searching for the root cause of a performance issue.

There are other application monitoring and management tools on the market. What makes AppEnsure different?

While there are a variety of APM tools on the market, AppEnsure is truly unique in its capabilities. Our differentiators include:

• Application agnostic – Most application management tools only work with custom applications; however, purchased applications make up most of the applications currently used by organizations, >90%. AppEnsure is able to automatically discover and monitor both types of applications, providing the visibility needed by IT to analyze and correct issues.
• Complete visibility of the application’s view of infrastructure – AppEnsure provides insight right from the application layer to the supporting infrastructure; servers, storage, network & services, which is a much broader scope than other tools.
• Storage traffic analysis – While most other application management tools don’t provide any storage traffic analysis, AppEnsure provides analysis from the application layer to Ethernet packets.

Although these features seem complex, we ensure that AppEnsure is easy to use and provides clear remedial steps to App Ops in just three clicks.

What industries are seeing the most benefit by using AppEnsure?

We believe that organizations with high volumes and high value transactions would most benefit from AppEnsure. Verticals include banking, legal, accounting, consulting and eCommerce firms – basically all an organizations’ mission critical applications.

How easy is it for new users to set up AppEnsure and start seeing results?

Our design goal for AppEnsure was to create a solution that is easy to try and use. The great thing about setting up AppEnsure is that after a one click download and install, there is absolutely no need for configuration, as we automatically discover applications and are continuously doing virtual and physical topology discovery, in real time. We have automated root cause analysis and provide simple remedial steps, thus simplifying application management for App Ops & IT.