ExtraHop – Brief Note

Brief notes are summaries of briefings and conversations I’ve had, with only light “analysis.”

ExtraHop sells a hardware appliance for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) from the inside of the firewall, monitoring network traffic to find applications slowdowns and other problems, firing off alerts to admins after diagnosing these problems. If you’re interested in hunting down alerting on poorly performing application and diagnosing what’s wrong with them, these guys have something to offer. Recently, ExtraHop announced a partnership with Keynote Systems: Keynote’s web transaction monitoring would observe web apps from the outside of the firewall, while ExtraHop would do the behind-the-firewall, “back-end” monitoring. See their blog entry on the partnership as well.

There’s two appliances available, the EH2000 and the EH5000 which, as you can guess, do less and then more amounts of analysis, gated by gigabits (3 then 10) of traffic and number of devices (300 then 1,000).

Some key take-aways:

• Most people are skeptical of “magic” performance boosts from APM appliances like this. But, because of the ease of getting up and running – you essentially plug the ExtraHop pizza box in, it auto-discovery different applications and nodes, and then goes to work monitoring and alerting, pulling the info it needs from network traffic – a two week or so PoC is pretty good at winning people over.
• To that point, ExtraHop’s Jesse Rothstein alluded to how “it works better” is possible for the ExtraHop devices: in addition to the software they write, advanced in multi-core and cheaper storage allow them to do real-time network analysis that wasn’t possible previously.
• SaaS providers who, of course, need good APM for their network delivered applications are good customers for ExtraHop.
• Check out the brief write-up of Alaska Airlines use from Beth Schultz.