I don't think the economics quite work out that way. Most enterprise scaling products are extremely expensive, have long sales cycles, and require lots of exper

I don't think the economics quite work out that way. Most enterprise scaling products are extremely expensive, have long sales cycles, and require lots of expertise to install and maintain them. They affect your application architecture design because of the per-server or per-socket licensing. You're also pretty much going to have to use that once it's purchased and put in place. If it no longer fits your business need, you've just wasted a ton of money. In fast-moving businesses this is absurd. For slow-moving industrial-age Fortune 100s, it makes more sense. It also really sucks when you run into a problem and can't open the damn thing up. Case in point: I was working with some code that was instrumented with HP OpenView OVPA to collect performance analytics. When the new version of OVPA came out, we were planning a huge rollout to bring all 4k+ servers up to date. Problem is, the new major release had moved to a pthreads library and changed a bunch of the threading code, causing a 2 second lockup on start due to some sloppy code. For the vast majority of server software, this is almost undetectable, but these were CGIs that were invoked millions of times per hour. It took me about a day to locate the problem with truss (Solaris' strace). I had to spend a week in 5am meetings with HP's offshore development team to convince them that it was their bug. Of course, it took another week to get a patch.