Once moved to the cloud, applications become more challenging to manage. Cloud app performance management and performance monitoring tools help identify bottlenecks and other performance metrics.

Good tools can help determine if bottlenecks are isolated to the application itself or if there are system-wide issues with a particular provider. The most granular tools can even do a deep-dive into the app to see if individual processes, such as database queries, are running optimally.

For this review, we tested four commercial products -- Exoprise CloudReady, AppNeta, ThousandEyes and Dynatrace. We focused mainly on ease of deployment, day-to-day management, overall features and cost. We did not focus much on network overhead, but this is certainly a consideration, especially where agents need to be deployed.

AppNeta

AppNeta provides what the vendor calls ‘full stack’ application performance management. Four different modules (TraceView, AppView, PathView and FlowView) together provide a solution for performance monitoring of Web apps, SaaS and application networks, together with other network performance monitoring and analysis.

Monitoring is performed from a Web interface hosted by AppNeta and the sensors are run either from your own infrastructure or locations provided by AppNeta globally. There are several items that can be monitored without the need for agent deployment, but in order to use the TraceView module you need to deploy an agent to the server running the Web application.