One of the reasons I founded Stackify was because my developers didn’t have the tools they needed. The tools were designed for IT operations, the data my team needed was spread across too many different tools, and the pricing was very expensive.
Sadly, several years later, not much has changed in the industry. APM pricing is out of reach for most developers… until now!
Most of the long-established APM solutions currently in the market are targeted at large enterprises. Because of this, they need more expensive resources to attract and retain those accounts. Many times, this puts their product and engineering strategy at odds with the needs of small to mid-sized companies.
This is where we found our place. There are millions of small development teams or individual developers that need an APM solution like Retrace.
APM (application performance management) tools can collect an amazing amount of data that is valuable to developers, QA, IT operations, and others. I would argue that if your application matters to you and your customers, APM is a must have for a lot of reasons.
APM can help you do several key things:
The problem is, APM prices are still so expensive that most development teams can’t afford them.
APM shouldn’t be a luxury item only available to large enterprises.
Every developer needs to understand the performance of their app, all the way down to the code level. They need access to transaction traces, metrics, errors, and logs.
Traditional APM solutions were not designed for developers. They were designed for IT operations and measuring the quality of service of critical applications.
Many APM solutions lack key features like robust error tracking, application metrics, and especially correlation of application logging. Logs are critical to helping developers track down application problems. Correlating them to individual web requests or transactions, like Retrace does, is essential for developers.
Traditional APM is expensive enough. Having to also pay for a separate log management, error tracking, and/or other solutions only adds to the craziness.
We talk to companies every day who currently use one of these vendors or others. Of course, none of them are happy about the price. They are looking for other solutions.
Many of them partially remedy the solution by only installing APM on some of their servers and some of their apps.
Installing an APM solution on only a small % of servers helps get a little bit of insight into the performance of your applications.
However, it is hard to ensure that every one of your customers is happy if you aren’t tracking every transaction. You could falsely think everything is working perfectly because your only seeing part of the story.
Would your marketing team be happy if Google Analytics only randomly tracked part of your website traffic? Of course not.
At Stackify we have built a fantastic APM solution of our own, Retrace. We understand what it takes to develop and host it. We collect and store a ton of data. Performance summaries, code level transaction traces, errors, logs, metrics, etc. It is definitely a lot of data, but it doesn’t justify prices being so high.
Our business model was designed to ensure we could deliver a high-quality product at affordable APM prices. We want to help every development team in the world optimize and monitor the performance of their applications.
Our focus has always been on developers. We even decided to make Prefix, an awesome lightweight profiler specifically designed for developers.
We have thousands of companies in over 120 countries that use our Prefix & Retrace products. With this power duo, you’re covering each stop of the development cycle from writing the code on your own machine all the way through staging, QA, and production.
Stackify's APM tools are used by thousands of .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, & Ruby developers all over the world.
Explore Retrace's product features to learn more.
