Scott shares his thoughts around the Observability market for 2022. Part 3 of 3. AppDynamics, Elastic APM (Observability), and SolarWinds are covered, with Lighstep and Catchpoint as notable mentions.
Air Date: 07/14/2022
Support the SMC Journal. Buy Me A Coffee: https://bit.ly/smcjournalcoffee
Show Notes:
AppDynamics – Cisco is having to adapt to a changing world, from traditional APM. Their acquisitions (for example, ThousandEyes that does Digital Experience or End User Monitoring) have yet to be closely integrated and aligned. They just recently announced AppDynamics Cloud to address Cloud Native monitoring (mainly a Kubernetes play):
Elastic – Great logging and visualizations, however it can be cumbersome and complex to set up in-house. Many people know about the Elastic search and indexing capabilities, but fewer know about the other capabilities they have, which include performance and security monitoring/observability.
SolarWinds – Coming from the APM world, SolarWinds is having to tackle modern observability. “Hybrid Cloud Observabilty” was a new service launched in April 2022:
https://www.solarwinds.com/hybrid-cloud-observability
The bigger question for SolarWinds is if they can overcome the negative legacy of the major hack of 2020. Many say, “No”. What do you think?
NOT on the MQ: Lightstep (https://lightstep.com). Is this because they are owned by ServiceNow and are more incident response focused? The product does offer application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and distributed tracing. They are not even mentioned in the report.
NOT on MQ: CatchPoint – not a public company. Had about $50M in funding. Dun & Bradstreet estimates $60M/yr revenue. It’s a wild card – focusing on the end user and Digital Experience Monitoring. It’s a competitor to ThousandEyes. They also own WebPageTest – long used by developers and performance engineers to gauge front-end web application performance. In my opinion – a prime candidate for an existing observability platform looking for that missing DEM piece (or perhaps they are weak there) as an acquisition. Or they could decide to just build their own platform and take market share slowly over time. I like the fact that they are not depending on any Cloud vendor to operate, which means they can watch the cloud region outages and report on them – as it should be.
With ALL of these platforms, there is one key word/theme that is central to their pitch:
“Complexity”
I always ask, “why don’t we just work to make it less complex?” I am always told “Complexity is a necessity.” Is this really true? What do you think?
This podcast is sponsored by Micro Focus and LoadRunner solutions. Performance matters. Did you know that LoadRunner solutions have the largest community of practitioners? Join the community at https://community.microfocus.com/adtd/b/sws-alm
Performance Engineering The LoadRunner Family Page:
https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/portfolio/performance-engineering/overview
Performance Playlist (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlUdEXI83_XoQrAsCj2A92v5AmXqVfoIO
This podcast is sponsored by StormForge. The StormForge Platform focuses on AI-powered software designed to help DevOps teams release with confidence and IT leaders to realize the promise of cloud-native – faster innovation with higher quality, resiliency, scalability, and efficiency. https://stormforge.io
