With RackSpace's recent acquisition of CloudKick, AppFirst, the only provider of complete data collection and proactive monitoring as a service (MaaS) solutions, now becomes the lone independent Cloud server monitoring and management solution available on the market today.  Demonstrating their continued commitment to provide real-time information for cloud management and monitoring, the company will roll out a new version this week of their AppFirst solution, providing deep integration with top cloud providers Amazon, SoftLayer, GoGrid and RackSpace.  Additional providers will be supported in the coming months. This announcement positions AppFirst as the only comprehensive server monitoring and management that works with any and all applications, independent of language and no matter where the servers are running -- on premises, in the cloud or in any combination.

"We've heard loud and clear through our rapid customer adoption that a pure, independent, cloud monitoring and management platform built entirely as SaaS, is the best model to power the continued growth and success of the cloud computing industry," said David Roth, president and CEO of AppFirst. "The RackSpace acquisition of CloudKick validates our position - managing and monitoring cloud servers is a critical business component for companies around the world.  With this change in the competitive landscape, AppFirst becomes THE only independent vendor of server monitoring and management solutions available."

The new version is built on the same technology as AppFirst Professional and AppFirst Basic and allows users to quickly add, remove and manage cloud servers directly from the AppFirst interface, which installs collectors on servers automatically.  Once the collector begins capturing real-time data, each server can be managed and monitored right from the AppFirst dashboard.

AppFirst captures everything occurring in the entire application, and its Deterministic Root Cause feature allows users to drive right to the root cause on each and every incident, eliminating the hours, days and sometimes weeks it takes to track the source of an issue down.  Using patent-pending technology, AppFirst removes the need to use statistical methods to isolate causes of performance degradation. Old methods of monitoring provide ample opportunity for the proposed solution to be wrong and have a narrow focus of polling for data on a few components of an application or are language runtime specific, which means users are not seeing everything across the application stack.