What is APM?
An Overview of Application Performance Monitoring
Application performance monitoring (APM) is a set of tools and practices designed to diagnose and optimize application performance. It involves tracking key metrics, identifying issues, and providing insights into application behavior, ensuring quick, efficient, and error-free operation. APM ultimately enhances the user experience by proactively addressing performance challenges.
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Why do businesses need APM?
In today's digital age, delivering high-quality digital experiences is crucial for businesses to keep their customers satisfied. However, modern applications are complex and can fail in intricate ways, making it essential to detect and resolve issues promptly. This is where Application Performance Monitoring (APM) becomes a valuable tool for organizations.
By utilizing an APM tool, businesses can quickly identify the root cause of issues in their applications. The tool enables them to drill down to the exact line of code or component causing issues, reducing downtime and enhancing application performance ensuring uninterrupted digital experiences for their customers.
APM also provides insights into application performance, allowing businesses to optimize their digital experiences for their customers. With APM, organizations can identify key areas of improvement and take steps to target their marketing campaigns more effectively, resulting in increased customer engagement and loyalty.
APM tools can help businesses reduce IT costs by enabling them to identify and resolve issues quickly, minimizing the need for additional resources. By leveraging APM, businesses can stay ahead of the competition by providing seamless digital experiences to their customers, resulting in higher satisfaction levels and increased loyalty.
What are the key features to look for in an APM Tool?
Application performance monitoring helps you map the various aspects of your application's complexities to better understand how the application works. When selecting an APM tool for your monitoring purposes, look for these basic features:
Topology Maps
Applications generally communicate with one or more external resources to complete various actions, be it caching, updating the database, or waiting for an external provider like a payment gateway. Visualizing these dependencies helps DevOps and IT admins quickly identify bottlenecks and remediate issues.
Key Transactions
Monitor the performance of business-critical transactions at a glance by labeling them as key transactions. Doing so enables you to save time searching for transactions and helps you debug and analyze them with ease.
Distributed Tracing
With distributed tracing, you can track transaction traces made from one application to another. This enables you to monitor calls made between applications and isolate problems.
Error Analytics
Knowing when and how frequently errors happen in an application enables organizations to develop crucial strategies to build more robust products and make the user experience more seamless.
Custom Metrics
Enabling developers to customize application-specific metrics ensures they can evaluate performance bottlenecks and tweak the existing codebase.
Milestone Markers
Milestone markers help you record significant events in your application’s life cycle, like build deployments, product updates, feature enhancements, and infrastructure upgrades.
Rule-based Alerting
With a continuous monitoring solution offloading most of the operations-related worries, alerting is just the icing on the cake. DevOps teams can set up rules to receive alerts during an irregularity, freeing up their time to manage other day-to-day operations since they won’t have to constantly check on the metrics.
AI for Anomaly Detection
The idea behind anomaly detection is to uncover any abnormal spikes in an application's critical performance attributes. An anomaly is triggered when a KPI falls below or exceeds the previously benchmarked values. This helps you handle unforeseen issues that could have a big impact later.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for APM
Measuring application performance goes beyond application availability and responsiveness. It is crucial to establish a baseline for key parameters, as this helps you detect application degradation or anomalies. To begin, measure your application performance with these KPIs:
- Are there any seasonal patterns in response time or throughput?
- Did the latest update affect your application performance?
- Does your average response time vary in relation to throughput?
- Have you defined how fast your application should run?
- How do response time and throughput affect your user experience?
- How often does your application crash?
- Does it happen sporadically or does it occur frequently?
- Can you trace the exact root cause via logs?
- Do you have a good understanding of how your application connects and communicates with all other internal and third-party services?
- How do external components affect your application performance?
- Can your servers handle the increasing traffic, or do you need to scale them?
- Are your application services up and available 24x7?
- If not, have you identified the cause of application downtime?
What are the benefits of application performance monitoring?
Application performance monitoring helps you proactively identify and eliminate issues in real time, thereby helping you deliver a seamless end-user experience.
Who uses APM monitoring tools?
DevOpsAn APM tool can alert DevOps teams immediately when an application behaves erratically. These continuous monitoring solutions provide key insights on errors, including stacktraces, and enable DevOps to take further actions during an emergency, like applying a quick patch, running an automation script, or reporting details to the concerned teams.
IT operationsAPM tools track performance metrics over time and offer quick snapshots of intensive operations, helping teams spot areas for improvement. They provide a comprehensive view of application topology, enabling swift identification of issues and faster response through alerting and anomaly detection.
Site reliability engineers (SREs)APM supports site reliability engineers (SREs) by offering real-time performance insights and telemetry data, diagnosing issues, optimizing system reliability, and improving incident response. It tracks metrics, predicts demand spikes, and scales infrastructure effectively using actionable data and alerts. This enables quick issue resolution, proactive management, and consistent performance.
Quality AssuranceEnsuring that a new update enhances response time, or deciding to revert to an earlier build, requires a comparison of key metrics before and after deployment. APM tools with options to mark significant infrastructure updates as milestones and compare reports make this a breeze.
DevelopersAPM eliminates the need for developers to manually gather key environmental details required to simulate and fix an issue. These tools capture the entire application context in depth, including stacktraces, session details, calls to databases, and other dependent components. APM tools even provide APIs for developers to define their own application-specific metrics.
Happy Customers
Why do businesses need APM?
Businesses need APM because it provides real-time performance insights crucial for maintaining a competitive edge in the digital era. APM helps reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) through baseline performance monitoring, automated alerting, and root cause analysis. It breaks down operational silos, particularly in complex multi-cloud environments, by aligning IT with business objectives and thereby enhancing the user experience. As APM solutions evolve with advancements like observability and OpenTelemetry, they help businesses meet and exceed customer expectations while prioritizing issues that impact key business outcomes.
What can an APM solution do for you?
94%
Reduction in response time
96%
Reduced DB calls
78%
Reduced calls to external components
90%
Optimization in SQL queries
90%
Reduced exceptions
Best Practices
The following are a few pointers that needs to be considered before buying an APM tool:
- Check if the APM vendor supports your application language and cloud platform
- Check if they are agent-based, agentless or on-premise
- Evaluate and see if the product can be customized to your needs
- Educate your staff