Consider that the Age of the Cloud has precipitated a new agent concept which is lightweight, deploys quickly, and goes in virtually undetected with zero configuration. These agents are built with a survival mode in mind including a self-healing option for hands-free maintenance. At the time when we were looking for a monitoring solution (2006-2007) APM as we know it today had yet to be defined. There was no Gartner MQ, real-user-monitoring (RUM) was too high level, “agent monitoring” brought concerns of overhead and complexity, instrumenting the application meant to ARM it (i.e. Application Response Measurement), and transaction tagging was a pipe dream.
There was no Gartner MQ, real-user-monitoring (RUM) was too high level, “agent monitoring” brought concerns of overhead and complexity, instrumenting the application meant to ARM it (i.e. Application Response Measurement), and transaction tagging was a pipe dream. This created a fierce debate on the risks and rewards of agent vs. agentless monitoring…