SaaS-y start-up amps up its application performance management software

Applications come in many flavors and application performance management upstart New Relic announced that not only will the vendor deliver product to manage open-source-developed Ruby on Rails apps, but it will also help customers monitor the performance of Java applications – with an updated software-as-a-service, on-demand payment model. 

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New Relic Monday made available Rails Performance Management, or RPM, Version 2 – the second large revision of its flagship software, which the start-up introduced in June 2008 and delivers to customers using a SaaS model. Ruby on Rails is the open source Web application framework du jour for Web 2.0 applications, and industry watchers expect it to take a similar path as Java 2, Enterprise Edition, which took the place of many C++ applications in customer environments. RPM 2.0 is designed for application development teams and IT operations groups to monitor, troubleshoot and manage applications. The company added capabilities to manage performance of Java applications in RPM 2, which includes support for applications developed on WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty and Glassfish as well as frameworks such as Spring, Grails and JEE.

“More and more we found customers that had Rails applications, also had Java apps that needed to be managed,” says Mike Malloy, vice president of sales and marketing at New Relic. “The software is designed to enable customers to go from modeling their applications to automatic problem detection. We don’t assume everyone has time to piece the path of problem solving together so RPM does it for the customer.”

RPM customers install an agent in their environment to manage the application. The agent communicates to a server in New Relic’s environment and the presentation, correlation and management capabilities are delivered as a service. New features in this release include scenario-based workflows to facilitate problem solving, Malloy says, explaining that IT managers can see an application overview and click down for code-level diagnostics. A redesigned interface supports multiple functions such as monitoring, application troubleshooting and tuning, root-cause diagnosis and proactive planning, according to New Relic.

And customers pay for the SaaS management application via subscription, and now with this release, RPM 2 buyers will have the option to use the software on demand – meaning they pay only for the time and capabilities they consume. Customer can sign up for RPM on a month-to-month basis and also pay for the software based on the actual hours their hosts were connected to the RPM application management service, the company says. Financial savings will be realized by eliminating initial acquisition and implementation costs as well as long-term license fees, which could result in unused software in customer environments, Malloy says.

“Customers can manage five servers for one month and at the end of the month walk away. They can pay for only what they use. We think that this on-demand payment innovation is the future way that IT software will be used and paid for, just as cloud computing enables IT buys to pay for their infrastructure as they use it,” Malloy says. “If IT can basically buy infrastructure by the hour but has to pay for three to five years for a software application, they are spending more than they need to for applications that could ultimately end up as shelfware.”

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Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.