The IT operations management space (ITOM) is crowded with a complex web of monitoring vendors claiming their tools solve every problem under the enterprise sun. While we pride ourselves at Zenoss as a unified monitoring solution, this classification also creates confusion as customers try to differentiate which areas are actually unified within a single vendor. Compounding this confusion is the rise in popularity of application performance monitoring (APM), where APM vendors may also unify the monitoring of various parts of the IT stack. At Zenoss headquarters, common misunderstandings occur on a daily basis about the differences in Zenoss breadth and what the leading APM vendors provide, specifically New Relic, AppDynamics & Dynatrace. The reality is very little overlap occurs within these quadrants, and in fact, Zenoss serves as a complementary solution to any APM product. Consider the following stack segmentation.
As indicated, Zenoss focuses on unifying the monitoring of an IT organization’s physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure as well as monitoring core infrastructure or middleware-class applications such as databases or application servers. APM vendors tend to focus on the performance of a business application with respect to the end user’s experience and may track some supporting metrics from the OS and virtualization layers. For a holistic approach, operations teams require both to ensure maximum service assurance. Zenoss provides the proactive notifications about problems before they affect a service; APM provides the indicators about end-user disruption within a service. Both cooperate to contribute towards locating the root cause of a slowdown or outage, whether it lies in the application itself or in the infrastructure supplying resources to the application.
In short, operations management teams can rarely succeed without the proactive capabilities of infrastructure monitoring nor can they ignore the end-user health provided via APM. Combining the power of Zenoss with APM completes the IT operations purview and provides a comprehensive unification of the monitoring story.
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