Is there anything better than free? Just saying the word sets off a burst of happy feelings (or maybe it’s endorphins) in most people. It’s true, people love getting things for free, whether it’s those times someone picked up the whole check for a fantastic dinner or just trying free food samples at a local food court.

In the world of enterprise technology, free is arguably just as popular as it is in the everyday world. Free open-source software runs much of the Internet, whether it’s the servers that power websites or the browsers people use to access them. And many businesses offer free versions of their products, either as time-limited trials or as “freemium” versions that can be freely used as long as one wants but that lack the full feature set of the commercial paid versions.

Of course, as the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Those businesses using open source need to pay for service and support or invest in the training and research to build up those capabilities internally. And using freemium versions of products usually means making do with limited feature sets and regular pitches to upgrade to the full version.

Still, free can be a very useful tool, especially in the world of application and network performance management and monitoring. For a long time, the traditional high cost and high complexity of products in this area have left many businesses unable or afraid to take the first key steps into understanding and managing performance.

However, recently we’ve seen a big rise in the number of vendors offering free versions of their performance management and monitoring tools. While not as functional as the “premium” pay versions, they provide basic core functionality for understanding performance management. They also offer a point of entry to performance management for those organizations that either couldn’t afford traditional performance management or that lacked the expertise to get up and running with a paid product.

In the Aberdeen report Yes, There is Such a Thing as Free APM, we analyze the trends driving this move to free performance management offerings and look to see if the demand exists in business to make these “freemium” offerings a legitimate driver towards increased deployment of performance management solutions.

Jim Rapoza is Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group.

Related Links:

Aberdeen IT Infrastructure Practice

Aberdeen Report: Yes, There is Such a Thing as Free APM