Extrahop Takes Application Performance Monitoring To Amazon's Public Cloud

The Seattle-based vendor Wednesday launched Extrahop For Amazon Web Services, a new technology that analyzes wire data moving between instances, services and users in AWS environments to give users a view of how their applications are performing.

Extrahop For Amazon Web Services runs on Extrahop's physical and virtual appliances and lets organizations track workloads running on-premise and in the public cloud, Erik Giesa, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Extrahop, said in an interview.

"This gives them a single pane of glass for workloads running on-premise and on AWS," he told CRN.

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Robi Johnston, director of managed services at 2nd Watch, a Seattle-based AWS consulting partner, told CRN the lack of visibility into public cloud environments, particularly when it comes to performance and security, has been a "roadblock" for some organizations.

Extrahop's technology "not only enables them to identify the best applications for migration, it also allows them to optimize the performance and security of those applications once the migration is complete," Johnston said in an email.

Amazon's CloudWatch service does something similar. It monitors CPU utilization, latency and request counts, and supports user-customized metrics for things such as memory usage, transaction volumes and error rates. But Extrahop For Amazon Web Services tracks more fine-grained metrics, such as processing time and network latency when accessing AWS services.

The combination of CloudWatch and Extrahop gives users a complete picture not just of what resources are being used in the public cloud, but how they're being used, said Extrahop's Giesa. "This lets you figure out if a specific workload you've migrated is meeting your internal SLA," he said.

Wire data analysis is a key feature here, as this lets Extrahop determine how a specific EC2 instance is connected to a specific S3 storage bucket, and in what region. "This is how we get visibility into all tiers," Giesa said.

Being able to see what's happening in AWS opens up a bunch of opportunities for Extrahop's channel partners, Giesa told CRN. No enterprise is going to put all of its workloads in the public cloud, so figuring which ones are best suited for AWS can be challenging, he said.

There are certain characteristics that make a workload ideal for AWS, such as the need to scale up and down over time based on demand. Helping enterprises figure out how to use the AWS public cloud can be a nice business for partners, Giesa said.

Extrahop partners also can keep track of whether all the components of a customer's application running in AWS are working as expected and, if not, offer advice on how to tune and optimize them, Giesa said.

Using Extrahop, 2nd Watch keeps tabs on its customers' system-level metrics to be more proactive in managing enterprise infrastructure in AWS, Johnston said.

PUBLISHED NOV. 7, 2013