”The complexity of APM solutions will continue to decrease, making them lower cost and easily implemented.”
Jonah Kowall
Research Director in Gartner’s IT Operations Research Group”Smaller [APM] boxes/solutions with less features but advanced capabilities and an emphasis on ease of use, to target mission critical pain points, will do well in the wider market.”
Michael Azoff
Principal Analyst, Ovum
Towards the end of 2013, Gartner, Ovum, and other industry experts sounded the death knell for monolithic, end-to-end APM solutions with exhaustive feature sets. With an alarming degree of certainty, no less. The same experts also heralded the rise of “small-box, point solutions.” in their stead. Meanwhile, ManageEngine’s Applications Manager held its own as an end-to-end solution in the global APM industry. Our insights told us there will be customers looking for a comprehensive APM solution, and we were right.
A few days ago, we stumbled upon this nugget of a customer testimonial (below) and felt vindicated in our stand. Jeff Cunningham, the Unix administrator at New York-based IntraLinks, a global technology provider of inter-enterprise content management and collaboration solutions, spoke to us at last year’s Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco. At IntraLinks, Applications Manager’s full feature set is really being put through the paces.
Applications Manager has been in use at IntraLinks for over two years. As Jeff tells us, IntraLinks uses Applications Manager in a wide array of capacities and environments. To start, Applications Manager is used not only in development and quality control but also in production systems monitoring and staging area monitoring. Applications Manager has also been entrusted with monitoring servers, disk space, and web servers.
Jeff particularly likes the speed and ease of use of Applications Manager. At IntraLinks, Applications Manager has had to earn its stripes as it’s not the only monitoring solution the company uses. IntraLinks also uses Oracle’s Ops Center, and Jeff puts the two in perspective:
“Although (Ops Center) works well for (monitoring) certain hardware, it doesn’t give us all the data, speed and flexibility that ManageEngine does; or capability to monitor all the other applications that we have.”
Jeff adds, “We also used UpTime for a while. It was okay, but it didn’t have as many tools as ManageEngine does. For example, the JMX monitoring support that ManageEngine provides is a very critical monitor in our environment. And UpTime did not have that option.”
The strong feature base of Applications Manager comes to the fore at IntraLinks, once again proving its worth when put to the test against competition:
“A lot of [Applications Manager] features , like the downtime scheduler, are really good. We use that a lot when we are doing downtime in testing, we can set up a bunch of alerts. UpTime didn’t have that feature again. …We are using DynaTrace, which is a good troubleshooting tool, but (it’s) not really useful when it comes to monitoring an IT environment 24/7. ManageEngine gives us that capability.”
Jeff goes on to reward our belief in providing a solution that helps customers achieve end-to-end visibility of their IT environment:
”ManageEngine [Applications Manager] is just better overall,” says Jeff. “The dashboard features [are] pretty good for giving our executives an overall view of everything that’s going on. …It has a top 10 monitor that shows the top 10 web servers, top 10 disks, top 10 CPUs – all that data is great! It gives us a good idea of which one of our servers is overloaded, which one of our servers has a constant, disk space filling up problem. We get trend reports which are really great. It’s helped with a lot troubleshooting with regards to lots of trends of different servers’ [issues and causes].”
At times, it pays when you dare to stand out from the crowd. It’s that willingness to swim upstream, against the tide, that sets ManageEngine’s Applications Manager apart and in a class of its own.
Try out Applications Manager today for free!
Hope there is a good go-to-market strategy. Best wishes.
Great write-up!