How Much Should I Budget for an APM Solution?

You have a couple considerations before someone can give you a realistic budget.

* What tools have been tried before? Why are they not being considered now? Who is going to approach procurement?
You need to make a business case for this next investment - no matter the dollar volume.

* Is your web app on-premise or cloud? How many instances? What volume of transactions or concurrent users? Any potentials mergers or acquisitions upcoming, that might introduce a different tool or requirement?

This affects the license model, and duration that you might need it, which directly impacts the price.

* What are you monitoring goals? Are you just looking for up/down status? Are you planning to migrate any other applications to the web? What visibility into performance do you have for non-web systems today? How many other applications would follow-on, after this initial project?

This gives you an idea of the duration and extent of a relationship that you might need with a given vendor.

* What skills and organization do you have available? Is there a dedicated team in place? How do you handle turnover? Will you be looking for long-term services support and operation? How do you handle training, internal and external?

This gives you and idea into your upfront, and on-going training and services (staff augmentation) needs.

* How much vendor evaluation are you prepared to undertake? Do you have criteria established? Do you have a pilot strategy? Are you following a corporate mandate or enterprise strategy?

You need to 'know' what you want before the vendors tell you what 'you need'! There is nothing more expensive that a host of capabilities that you will never employ.

* Who are your stakeholders and how will they participate? Do you have visibility into Development and Testing? Are you bringing operational metrics back to the business? Do you need to integrate alerts and/or data with a 3rd party operations center?

You need to know who really cares about performance in order to get support for any level of investment, and you need to meet their expectations.

The better you understand your organization's prior experiences; assess the potential scope of what will be monitored long-term; assess the ability of your current team to support, implement and maintain the solution for the long-term; the better you will be able to evaluate and negotiate with the various vendors - and get a solution that fits the way your organization works.

For a modest investment, get a copy of the vendor-neutral APM Best Practices www.amazon.com
The first third of the book is all about Planning an APM initiative, from Business Justification through Pilot Evaluation.

I'd say that assuming that you have identified and prioritized the requirements of your use-case, and assuming that all the providers you listed meet your use-case requirements, you've answered your own question already: take the quotes they have provided you and calculate the mean value to use as your budgetary number.
When the time comes to turn that budgetary number into explicit acquisition/implementation/operation dollar values, open a negotiation dialogue with those providers and use that process to see with which provider you will be able to form the most effective partnership and relationship.

A few notes to remember:
If the $ cost reached after negotiation is greater than a quantified dollar value of the performance issues you and/or your customers are experiencing, then you may want to consider the wisdom of acquiring and operating the service.
Don't confuse cost with value: if one negotiation results in the lowest cost but doesn't deliver the functionality that you've prioritized, then it is worthless.

Each manufacturer takes the form of licensing for the price of their products. Some license by JVM, others charge per processor or processor core etc. It will also depend on the size of the environment. in addition to the need for a senior analyst to evaluate the results of the tool. Example In www.dynatrace.com
3 options: Self-Service, Enterprise or Webscale, more
2 options Available: on-premises or as SaaS and more,
2 licensing options: perpetual or annual licenses

One project in Brazil (server based Enterprise, perpetual and on-premises licencing)
8 Servers: .Net/IIS (Website, Webservices\Windows Services) = 8 Agents
2 Servers: MS SQL Server – one active node cluster = 2x8 = 16 Agents
1 Server: database Progress = 1 Agent
2 "Load balancing" Servers: Apache (2FA - Two-Factor Authentication System for Apache and SSH) = 2 Agent
2 Active Directory Servers = 2 Agents

Estimated and approximate prices
12 Agents = ~U$50K;
Database 17 Agents = ~U$70K.
TOTAL: ~U$120K

Without the cost of the Sr Analyst.

Janet,
Looks like there has been many responses to your question and I am sure you probably have info overload :)

For an APM solution......the cost is directly proportional to it's capabilities offered from the respective Vendor. A good approach is to have a "face-off" with a few to see how they match up and create a scoring card. We did that at my previous job at a financial institution.

It definitely helps when they actually put their money where their mouth is. Having their product actually running in your environment (isolated, of course) and you seeing your own data will open up (even more) your understanding of their capabilities, not to mention the challenges they will face and would have to overcome.

You can end up spending anywhere from $1-$3 mil annually depending on what bells and whistles you want.

Feel free to reach out to me if you want to chat 1:1...........I'd be happy to assist in any way possible.

Happy APM Shopping.

Cheers
Manish

I understand the user’s confusion, but to understand why the price is really “all over the place”, one should ask the following question as an exercise “How much should I budget for a trip to Paris?” Well, is that for one person or for a family? Budget or luxury travel? 1 day or 1 month? Swim, travel by plane or by boat? Leaving from the E or the W coast? I am using this as an example to explain how many things go into the equation of figuring out a price for an APM solution. Here are some questions your colleague my want to ask him/herself:

- How many applications do I need to monitor? Depending on the size of the enterprise this could be from tens to many hundreds

- How many transactions on the average do I want to monitor for each application (about 10 is a good average)

- From how many location do I want to monitor my applications? Usually monitoring is done from the locations where your customers are located, these can be locations around the US or around the world for a big bank or enterprise

- Do I just want to monitor (know when something breaks or does not perform as expected) or do I also want to be able to troubleshoot? Troubleshooting implies the ability to connect the front-end user experience to the back-end applications servers, databases, middleware, mainframes, 3rd party services, etc.

- Do I want to be able to troubleshoot also infrastructure issues and connect them to the end-user experience? In this case you may need a solution that can look at infrastructure components and services, physical, virtual, containerized, and connect them all together into a full picture.

- Finally, last but not least, do you want the solution to reside on your premises (maybe due to regulatory and privacy concerns) or can it reside in the cloud? This has also budgetary consideration, whereby an on-premises solution is budgeted as CapEx and a cloud solution is usually budgeted as an OpEx and pay as you go.
I hope this explains a little bit why it is not so simple to provide a quick answer. A quick answer would imply a simplistic analysis of the situation that may not provide the appropriate answer, not to mention that many companies have on-going relationships that provide significat discounts to any off-the-cuff quoted answers, and the discounts can be VERY significant.

Does that help at all?

Based on the information provided I would estimate somewhere between $0.05 and $30,000,000 give or take a few based on unforeseen implementation costs.

This is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you're only interested in the cost, I suggest you look at the situation from the opposite point of view: how much does each minute/hour of service degradation cost me? That will tell you how much you ought to pay.

When it comes to selecting an APM service provider, the costs vary as do the capabilities. In our organization, we operate with a thin technologist layer and also focus on 80/20 in troubleshooting. Generally, the higher the cost, the better the coverage out-of-the-box. So given this information - you can find very inexpensive service providers when you need 80/20 coverage, or you can pay for the extra coverage and go for 90/10 or 95/5. As a general rule, I think that end user coverage ranges from $5-10k per 1M monthly active users. APM coverage can range from $50 to $1000 per box in your stack. If you want to discuss more, feel free to drop me a note. I'll send a LinkedIn Request.

I don't think anyone here can give you accurate pricing/budgeting for your enviroment without knowing the fine details; my advice is to set up a proof of concept to see which tool best meets your needs and expectations, then ask about pricing. I highly recommend the new SaaS verison of Dynatrace (Not Dynatrace AppMon). It was extremely easy for us to deploy, configure and manage (a copule hours from zero to deployed and configured) As far as features go, the automatic baselining and AI engine take a big chunk of work off our hands (medium bank here). It collects, summarizes and analyzes application and host level metrics (including host log files and hypervisor host info) from the VM environemnts in our datacenter and then presents it to us in easy enough format to help us make better decisions and tune accordingly before our customers inform us of problems. We also use the synthetic webchecks to emulate end user testing which is a wonderful feature. We only have it on production systems for the time being but looking to expand to dev and qa environments as soon as budget is approved. The cost will vary based on utilization and size of deployment but about $50K is a good place to start budgeting for a medium environemnt of about 20 Hosts including app servers, web servers, databases and file servers. Test out all the top players in the APM space and find what works best for you and your team, but as far as I'm concerned I'm sold on Dynatrace SaaS solution.

$400K to $700K would be a good ball park for an APM solution

Sure there are other vendors who can provide the solutions, but how many of them have all under one umbrella. With APP D you can monitor your Applications, DB, Machine, EndUser, Analytics, Synthetic etc all on one Dashboard, now you do not have to look in multiple tools to correlate the data.

At the end of the day, you want to make sure you are partnering with a vendor who is willing to ensure you see success. Most of these solutions are very similar and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The great thing about software is it can be discounted, it really comes down to who you feel will offer the most value for your specific use case and what you feel the solution it self is worth. It is the vendors job to convince you through ROI and real customer feedback what value their APM tool can bring to your organization. If you are open to a conversation feel free to reach out.

It all depends on the size of the deployment and if the customer is would like to have on premise perpetual licenses or run in a SaaS environment. We offer both options and typically are very competitive on our price point.

For on premise we price per agent and SaaS we price based on consumption.

CA Also offers application managed services for both onpremise and SaaS deployment that help customers run everything from deployment, configuration, to upgrades.

I could easily get some preliminary numbers out if I knew what path the customer would like to take (SaaS or on premise).

There are several good considerations already here in regard to the APM's price provided with good appreciation. I consider adequate and necessary to do something previously, is the analysis of going to the budget topic, that is something very important associated to this question, and that's what I only would add that Application Management should not be unlinked from the platform in which it is implemented and its monitoring is an essential fact to consider join to the APM, mainly for the DB engines and Storage systems, I would refer do a deep assessment of your environment to considering what other elements are associated with the application, the DB, and other possible interfaces.

In that way to consider if an APM and a complementary monitoring tools would provide enough outcomes in the way they can contribute having a good control of performance proactively, check on which type of server is hosted the application, most of the issues are associated not only with the application performance or the integrally of services and data but to the holding performance behind of it. Money here is a second level that depends on the first decision making aspect, what to monitor and what is the environment of it before to go and select a solution by price.

Before the budgeting question can be answered, you need to define below:

> What specific Information you are trying to get from your application (RPM, Service health, TTR, etc..)
> Do you need any integrations with your Infrastructure monitoring or ticketing platform
> Which APM is the absolute right fit for your application
> Does your application technology stack supported by the APM?
> Does APM agent stresses your application performance?
> Does APM agent kills your application service stability?
> Does this APM solution capable of providing a "user experience view" to you?

In my experience with APM products for our applications, not all products went well.
some of them actually killed the application even without a proper load on the application.
If you can tick above questions, pricing and budgeting is your last worry from my point of view.
Happy to explain further if you can give more info about the technologies you use.

Before the question can be answered, you need to define your goals and what is the info you are trying to get. In addition you talked about a big web application, the technology does matter and some solutions run better than others on different technologies. If you can tell us which technology you are using the answer might be more accurate

These prices are to Mexico, but maybe could be for US also.

Talking about Appmon, the Price is linked to the amount of agents. In the case of Dnet normally is 1 agent per server or app; in te case of Java is depending of the amount of JVMs, and is 1 agent per 1 JVM. This agents are to Aplication Server;

In the case of weserver, You need 1 agente per 1 webserver

In general the agent Price is $10,000 USD for App server; and $6,000 usd for webserver.

I hope this info be useful

Depends on the type of applications and there are different criteria. Best would be to create a document with your application architecture and get a few price proposals. Feel free to get in touch with sales@correlsense.com

I’ll start with a disclaimer: I work for Riverbed's SteelCentral team.

APM can mean different things for different people and can include multiple areas of monitoring:
- The user's experience.
- Server Side and Application Server monitoring (discovery ,tracing and diagnostics).
- Analytics (which in many cases is the "easy button" that helps you diagnose problems fast).
- Other features (infrastructure monitoring, network monitoring, different vendors typically have additional capabilities).

When deciding on an APM solution you have to decide what parts of your application environment you need to have visibility into (users, applications, servers, networks, other) and that will help determine the sizing and pricing.

There are some sites with additional information:
PC Magazine has a review with basic pricing info www.pcmag.com
There is also the Gartner peer insights where you can see reviews www.gartner.com

As mentioned earlier, I work for Riverbed’s SteelCentral team. SteelCentral focuses on end-to-end monitoring AND diagnostics leveraging a big data approach. Customers are reporting 10X improvement in their MTTR. SteelCentral captures every multi-tier transaction in depth at production scale and helps you get to the root cause of problems fast in few simple clicks.

You can try SteelCentral AppInternals at steelcentral.net

Hi APM price depends on the number and tye of application (web services, database, linux or windows processes, etc).

I’ll start with a disclaimer: I used to help sell code-level APM products when AppNeta had a product called TraceView (which is now with SolarWinds).

Your cost will depend on a few things depending on the tool you’re evaluating - number of production hosts (vs. test/staging), additional visibility like RUM and level of complexity (typically around error monitoring level, security, etc.). Deployments we used to work with could hover from the $5,000 range to upwards of $100,000 depending on the size or complexity of the app and user base.

Note though that strictly code-level APM doesn’t tell you the whole story. Apps are used by people. Apps are used over a network. Application latency due to database calls is one aspect of the delivery path that you should be monitoring. If you’re not monitoring the network between users (or locations approximating users - think synthetics) then you’re not monitoring the entire application delivery path.

So consider all of the sizing requirements and all the technologies, but also consider the end-user experience. If that is the pain you’re looking to alleviate, you should take a look at monitoring everything you can between their desk/phone/laptop and your infrastructure. I work for AppNeta and we can help you do that. We also like to keep our pricing pretty straightforward, so you can take a look at the pricing page on our site for more information on how we charge.

www.appneta.com

Your selection is inline and scalable. Other solution are not scalable and may not have depth. Remember you need to monitor resal user monitor. If you are in cloud some vendor have solution in market place too.

How many applications do you have and how many servers support them?

From all the APM tool we have analyzed APP D is the most economical including their year Professional support model, which I think no one can beat it. APP D lic cost vary based on what would you like to monitor and also based on the Model and Prod. Prod has a different rate and Non Prod have different pricing. If you work with the sales manager they can provide better deals.

We spend less than 10k a year on new relic and their pricing is EXCELLENT given the value and constant updating (without you having to do a thing) and how what you get for your money constantly improves day to day over time… its not fixed, its better over time

I can not see information enough to provide you with a regular estimate.
Some key aspects to understand in order to assess the required
investment are

* Maturity of the IT integration architecture ecosystem. Do they have
an extensive use of SOA architecture and simplified IT services?
* Target Requirements. How far they want to go and How critical is
this function for the business insights?
* Do they have the respources and skills to maintain and take control
of an open source tool? Or is the IT strategy based on COTS.?

A very very tentative estimate based on MEDIUM SCOPE SIZE, AVERAGE IT
MATURITY LEVEL STACK AND COMMERCIAL TOOLS (AppD, New Relic, Dynatrace,
CA, BMC)

I WOULD SAY SOMETHING BETWEEN 700-800K USD SHOULD BE REASONABLE FOR AN
INITIAL DEPLOYMENT. FURTHER INVESTMENT OVER FOLLOWING 1-2 YEARS WILL BE
REQUIRED TO ADAPT THE PLATFORM TO BUSINESS NEEDS

YOU COULD GET SOMETHING DECENT BETWEEN 400-500K USD but pretty much
depends on matutiry of their integration and capability to play with
some open source platforms where they need to take control, like Nagios
or Zabix
www.nagios.com

All very good response. Regardless of the solution you choose, please make sure you do consider the cost of SMEs. APM SMEs with industry experience is scarce and expensive. I'm currently engaged with a Large Financial Management client where we're setting up a APM CoE. Glad to chat with you on how you could approach this area and help with a business case.

Hi Before I give you my opinion, I read all of the post on the subject and they are all good valid suggestions. My Suggestion to you is SolarWins NPM / SAM ( Server Application Manager). These 2 products will cover anything you could throw at it. Simple to use , fast, tons of tools and features and SAM will monitor you Applications with ease , most important is that you do not have to hire consultants and have script experts to perform monitoring tasks, SAM provides many templates and have a great user community to assist you with your monitoring needs. We have been using this product for over 6 years and it is always improving its capabilities to be a valid tool in the market place.

Please have a look on the tools from Gigamon as well.... they have a better price stand compared to the players you mentioned. I have attended a demo session recently, so do try a demo with them once before the final decision.

Cheers!

There is no fixed figure to respond with (as you have seen).

I just remark that talking about “Solution” one always has to consider the “non product cost” part of the business plan (that no tool vendor will show you).

First of all is internal planning effort (select the field you want APM to apply)
Second is “define the minimum scope” of the solution below which the benefit would only be marginal (number of apps/sites what ever to cover)
Third: based on 2 estimate the sustained effort you have to apply inhouse to keep the lights on (people/process cost etc.)

This is the minimum business potential to start with. No tool will create benefit without people creating value with it.
If the benefit pays for this in the first step, this is the place to grow from. If not, it will die, irrespective of the cost in tooling).

Hi,
beside all mentioned advices I would add few others before searching for final solution. Fist of all zou should define whether solution is focused only for performance production issues or if it will be used for application support and development. Second poit is what will be prefered APM technolgy (listening lines comunication, any tool suggested by development tool vendor, induilding agents to code etc). Base on it they are diferent pricing scenario - server based, end user based etc and finally you can prepare budget for it.

APM solution depend upon no of application and scope like performance , Load, Stress , endurance, Volume and Longevity Testing.

In ideal business condition APM effort almost 25-30 % of overall functional testing Effort.

Have you also considered some of your existing tools? if your have System center Operations Manager buried in your Infrastructure team's monitoring department, then you may want them to dust that off and give you a demo of what it can do. Considering you may already own it you could get its features switched on to provide you with a good start so that you know what to benchmark against.
There will be hidden internal costs to get this up and running, but those will always be less that a new project and set up.

IT depends on number of targets server, applications which you want to monitor. Also at which level you want to monitor?
There are tools available to achieve your desire, like IBM offers Tivoli suite, BMC have product line under Performance & Analytics, etc.
Prices will come at last.

Hi, software pricing is all over the map. Keep it simple. One way to approach this is to say I will do a basic agent/monitoring (say server monitoring) as a free service across my enterprise. Even include it in the OS builds that are auto-deployed. Then some of the most critical apps will use the provider's premium offering at cost. This is the service that allows traces and other high end features, for that I will pay $xx dollars per server per subscription period only for those that were turned on at the end of the period based on auditing. That seems like a good freemium model, for your vendor and your customer base. The tool gets exposed across the landscape, and only the premium users pay for the premium services, and they can turn on or off rather easily.

Hi we use New Relic for APM Tool. For Two of our major projects , we pay approximately $5000 annually. Please don't count on this as there are customized enterprise plan you can discuss with New Relic. newrelic.com

It might depend on the number of agent that installed and number of applications server. From my experience, it will need at least 500,000 USD for the starting.

Hi- happy to have a brief chat on this. There are several key factors to live by and if you do, the.mn he budget and purchase process gets dramatically simplified. Thanks

A common approach with APM is that one solution fits all needs which is inaccurate. Your objectives for APM should first be defined. It might very well turn out that you may end up with couple of solutions working together to provide you the holistic picture of how the application is performing. I would address the following questions as the first step:
1. Is your objective to perfect the code of this web application and see all the function calls from within the JVMs that is running the different components of this application?
2. Are you interested in understanding the application behavior in production beyond development?
3. Do you want to understand the impact on the infrastructure based on demand on this application from users?
4. Is end user experience monitoring an important element of your performance management?
5. Do you want to understand who is using this application, when and how much and the responsiveness of this application?
6. Are you interested in baselining the performance of the application against a threshold you wish to maintain and understand how to fine tune application to meet the performance objectives?
7. Is application delivered virtually using technologies like Citrix Xendesktop or VM Horizon? If so, do you want to understand the impact of this virtual delivery on end user experience?
8. Should solution be on premises or is data allowed to be exported to a SaaS provider of APM?
The budget depends on the footprint of the servers that support this application. The total cost of ownership varies from vendor to vendor.