AppFirst Offers Free Server Monitoring Tool

As businesses extend the reach of their applications to customers and suppliers, pinpointing problems becomes more difficult. AppFirst is trying to make its mark in the application performance monitoring space with a free server monitoring tool.The company announced AppFirst Basic, a server based performance management tool. One challenge in determining application performance is figuring out what to monitor. Vendors are not able to look at all interactions in real time, so they pick various places to sit as information moves from place to place and examine different interactions. AppFirst's tools are stationed on the server and watch what the server operating system is doing. System administrators can use various dashboards to deduce how their IT infrastructure is performing.

The company's goal is to convince businesses to upgrade to its AppFirst Professional or AppFirst Unlimited performance monitoring tools, which are priced from $10 to $18 per server monitored per month. These products include features so companies can pinpoint trouble spots and take corrective actions to remedy any performance problems.

Founded in 2009, AppFirst has entered a marketplace that has been strewn with a wide variety of vendors with a bevy of methods of collecting performance data. The vendor's approach may appeal to some corporations, but it also could have difficulty wedging its way into this crowded space.