The Challenge

During performance & availability consulting engagements, we frequently had to first engineer telemetry solutions for our customer’s systems to gather real-world data before we could diagnose and resolve the long-term issues. Existing products in the market (2010) were unsatisfactory generally due to the inability to aggregate data from occasionally-connected systems or systems running in secure environments. We needed a way to gather performance, tracing (log), and error telemetry that produced very small files and had little or no performance impact on the system being monitored and then centralize and aggregate that data for our analysis.

The Solution

I established and led the team that developed an Application Performance Management (APM) product complete with agents, aggregation and analysis servers, and desktop clients. We marked this product to Microsoft .NET Development organizations. Our niche within the wider APM space focused not on monitoring server-side applications (which is the main focus of competitors like New Relic and Microsoft Application Insights) but on client-side applications. This attracted customers like financial, healthcare, and engineering companies that had sophisticated line-of-business applications that needed monitoring and support and specialized security requirements.

Once established, I led the team iterating in the market to refine a developer-oriented product over 10 years and five major releases. Directed subject matter experts to create long-tail content to drive interest, introduce marketing automation to drive customer conversion, and outside UX teams to upgrade and refine the UI based on customer feedback.

The Results

• Introduced a centralized logging platform for .NET applications in 2010.
• Added Software-as-a-Service option in 2012.
• Upgraded to multi-region, Azure-native solution in 2014 sustaining 10TB/Day of data ingestion.
• Consistently profitable with high customer retention in a highly competitive marketplace.

For more, see Loupe in Action