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Definition: What is Application Performance Monitoring?
Application Performance Monitoring is the practice and strategy of monitoring application performance, availability of applications, and end-user experience in real-time.
Application Performance Monitoring solutions allow IT and DevOps teams to detect anomalies, analyze trends, optimize resource use, troubleshoot issues before they impact end users directly, and gain insights that drive growth while increasing customer satisfaction. Application Performance Management and Monitoring can sometimes be used interchangeably.
Monitoring of application performance is conducted via:
- Your app should operate according to its expected parameters. It is easy to monitor its behavior in this manner.
- Sending alerts and collecting data regarding the source of problems are excellent ways to mitigate potential hazards.
- Analyze the data and consider its impact on your business.
- APM provides insight into how you can adapt your app environment so you can identify and correct similar problems in the future, which will reduce any negative impact on end-users. With APM, you can take a proactive approach when troubleshooting.
What is Application Performance Management?
Application Performance Management (APM) is an umbrella strategy for overseeing overall performance. This involves managing code, application dependencies, transaction times, and monitoring (which alerts users of potential problems via alert notifications).
Performance management goes one step further by using alerts from your monitoring tool to analyze user activity and pinpoint issues when and where they occurred.
Monitoring will notify you if your website or app is slow. At the same time, performance management helps identify causes for slowness while making necessary changes to address it.
An effective strategy provides DevOps teams with complete visibility into app performance. This allows them to identify trends and prepare better for potential issues.
Why Do You Need Application Performance Monitoring?
In the digital economy, limiting downtime, measuring response times and observing each business transaction's behavior is vitally important.
Discover Why Applications Are Running Slowly
If your application is running slowly, you should identify its cause. Unfortunately, modern software applications have highly distributed multi-tier architectures with complex frameworks for app development that make monitoring and performance management more challenging (while helping create better software).
Working on a distributed app makes these techniques ineffective for analyzing component dependencies; there are logs, metrics and events everywhere - in one cloud or between different clouds.
Make Sure Your Application Can Be Seen From End-To-End
Other methods are available for monitoring applications, including synthetic transactions, manually instrumenting the code or customer feedback.
While these tools have their place, APM tools provide more significant benefits that require less configuration time to reap their full potential. An application performance monitoring (APM) solution offers total transparency into the performance of your application without you needing to do any extra work yourself.
What Does APM Measure: Metrics You Should Track
APM tools provide two basic metrics to monitor: those which relate to user experiences of app performance and those which track infrastructure resources.
Here are the top application performance metrics you should watch:
- Real User Monitor, also known as User Experience monitoring, uses Apdex Scores to measure customer satisfaction. Apdex estimates how quickly your users respond when requesting your website or app.
- Response Time refers to an application's time to respond to user input.
- Error Rates measure the frequency and magnitude of errors within a specified period.
- Several Application Instances are instances for each specific application in use on a network. This number varies dynamically over time depending on factors like traffic and usage patterns.
- Request Rates measure the total requests in a specified period; as more requests come in, so does its request rate increase.
- CPU Usage of Applications, Servers, Virtual Machines or Containers: This metric represents the usage of all infrastructure. Application Uptime/Availability (SLAs)- This term indicates how functional programs are to users.
- Garbage Collection (GC) is used by Java Virtual Machines, Node.js Virtual Machines and other runtimes that perform garbage collection.
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Application Performance Monitoring Strategy:
At first glance, monitoring an application may seem simple enough. Still, you must implement a complex setup to get the most from monitoring its performance.
What elements should your performance management strategy contain?
Digital Experience Monitoring
Digital experience monitoring (or end-user experience monitoring - EUEM) tracks software applications from their users' perspective for signs of slowness, errors, or downtime.
RUM and APM: Our comparison between RUM and APM clarifies their differences.
Dynamic Application Architecture (Service Map)
APM tools create and update this diagram dynamically in real-time, making it easy for anyone to spot potential issues within an app.
Visual representations make the data easily digestible, allowing problem identification faster than ever.
Code Profiling
Transaction profiling, known as transaction tracing or code-level performance profiler, analyzes each user transaction to isolate specific interactions that cause performance problems.
You can follow each user from the front end all the way back using tracing, then locate particular lines of code, database queries or third-party calls that affect application performance and pinpoint them using this process.
Transaction Tracking
Maintaining optimal app performance requires ongoing infrastructure monitoring. An application performance monitoring solution enables you to conduct in-depth analyses by gathering relevant metrics as transaction traces from all components of your infrastructure, tracking transactions across tier boundaries and providing end-to-end real-time visibility through user journey tracing as well as app and server metrics that provide end-to-end connectivity between infrastructure, performance and user journey metrics.
Such solutions also keep tabs on business transactions so that you can understand when, why, and where slowdowns occurred.
IT Operations Analytics
IT operations analytics examines data to detect patterns, trends and performance issues that impact users and create real user monitoring solutions before any adverse situations arise.
Once this data has been gathered and analyzed, you can use this knowledge to formulate plans to address similar problems before they impact users directly.
Read more: Applying Security Best Practices To Software Solutions
App Performance Monitoring Tools
Traceview
SolarWinds was previously known as Tracelytics until it was acquired by AppNeta, when they formed part of SolarWinds.
Monitor application performance by offering deeper insight and an improved user experience.
Features:
- Traceview supports various technologies, including Java,.NET, PHP, Ruby and Python.
- Monitor SaaS-based applications, including web apps.
- Traceview offers detailed monitoring at the code level.
- Real-time monitoring systems provide a solution.
- Support can be obtained via email, telephone or online.
Dotcom-Monitor
Dotcom-Monitor APM allows you to gain a deep insight into the user experience of your web applications by assessing performance, functionality and accessibility metrics.Dotcom-Monitor provides comprehensive end-to-end monitoring solutions for applications, from web pages and frontend apps, through server and infrastructure metrics, to discovering blindspots in performance and adhering to service level agreements to deliver the best digital user experience possible.
Gain global observability for your web services, network infrastructure and applications at scale. Gain visibility of your applications, pages and benefits from a single dashboard.
Features:
- Create scripts that monitor key web transactions such as logins, shopping baskets and signups.
- Use real browsers to quickly and easily write scripts that simulate fundamental user interactions and transactions.
- Monitor web app performance to provide users with a positive user experience.
- Web applications can be monitored immediately for issues, reducing user impact and downtime.
EGInnovations
EGInnovation is a pioneer in IT infrastructure and application monitoring. Hundreds of companies worldwide rely on eG Innovations' flagship application performance monitoring tool, eG Enterprise, to solve IT challenges like slow apps, downtimes, code-level issues, capacity issues and hardware faults.
e.g. Enterprise is an invaluable tool enabling IT, DevOps, and application managers to detect performance issues and address them quickly.
Features:
- Keep an eye on how users are experiencing applications, and be alerted immediately if anything changes that affect their experience.
- Distributed transaction tracing allows you to gain code-level insights into your applications and identify reasons behind their slowness, such as code errors, slow queries or remote calls.
- Gain deep performance insights into your application infrastructure, including JVMs and CLRs, message queues, databases, application servers and more.
- Automatically discover dependencies among applications, IT components, and the cloud (virtualization, cloud services, containers etc). Topology maps can also be created.
- Use machine learning and correlational intelligence to pinpoint the cause of performance slowdowns.
Datadog
Datadog APM allows you to quickly identify dependencies, isolate them and eliminate bottlenecks, decrease latency, track error rates, and improve code efficiency to optimize your application.
Distributed traces can be linked with logs, profiles, synthetic tests, process-level metrics, and infrastructure metrics, providing an in-depth view of your app across hosts, containers and proxy functions.
Features:
- One integrated platform enables you to seamlessly align application performance metrics and infrastructure metrics.
- Tracing Without Boundaries: Search, analyze and retain 100% of all traces in real-time (no sampling). Tag-based rules allow you to keep only those which are essential.
- Continuous profiling: Examine the performance of your stack-level code with minimal overhead, identifying resource-consuming methods (CPU, memory etc.). Tags can help identify relevant requests among requests with traces and tags.
- Synthetic and Real User Monitoring: Improve your frontend applications' performance and user experience by simulating controlled API and browser tests or measuring them in real-time.
- Watchdog uses artificial intelligence-powered machine learning techniques to automatically detect anomalies and warn of fatigue.
- Make use of the Service Map to navigate applications easily. It includes various dashboards and visualizations already available, saving time spent on resolution and allowing for faster release of new features.
- Datadog aggregates metrics across your entire DevOps stack with over 450 integrations, providing complete visibility.
ManageEngine Application Manager
ManageEngine Applications Manager is an effective synthetic monitoring solution designed for today's dynamic environments, providing deep insight into the performance of critical business-critical apps both inside the data center and the cloud.
Plus, its intuitive setup makes for effortless use.
Features:
- Wedge Monitoring Agent-based with Bytecode Instrumentation, Code-level Diagnostics and Java/.NET PHP Node.js Ruby Applications.
- Server monitoring transactions at multiple locations within a multi-page workflow simulation.
- Support for over one hundred applications, infrastructure elements and services.
- Monitor hybrid cloud, virtual, and container technologies like Kubernetes and Docker to keep an eye on them all.
- ADTD allows you to identify and address the source of problems quickly.
- Machine learning analytics can assist in forecasting future resource consumption and growth.
Site24x7
Site24x7 provides an effective means of network monitoring. Site24x7 was born of the joint expertise of two industry giants - as an innovator of SaaS productivity applications and Manage Engine as an award-winning IT management software suite - combined.
Site24x7 currently boasts more than 10,000 customers globally, providing IT teams and DevOps of all sizes with a tool to troubleshoot problems with their cloud infrastructure and applications quickly.
Their APM Insight tool offers real-time application performance monitoring to optimize application performance. Site24x7's APM Insight allows you to seamlessly bridge the gap between application performance and end-user experience for seamless service to your clients.
Features:
- Discovering how your application connects and communicates with external components
- With 50+ metrics at your disposal, it's possible to measure how your app's performance impacts user experience.
- Distributed tracing helps you troubleshoot across microservices, distributed architectures, and others.
- AI-powered APM Tool allows you to identify and mitigate sudden performance spikes within applications.
- Watch and track vital business transactions live.
- Integration with Site24x7's Real User Monitoring provides a holistic view of front and backend performance.
New Relic
New Relic, and it quickly expanded, becoming an essential tool for business executives, IT teams, and developers.
Today it serves thousands of customers around the globe as APM software or application performance.
New Relic has offices worldwide, from Portland in California, Portland in Oregon and Dublin in Ireland to London, Zurich Munich - with annual growth rates approaching 45%
New Relic has experienced incredible growth: they generated $263 million in revenues during fiscal alone.New Relic APM makes it possible to identify performance issues quickly.
Features:
- Response time, throughput capacity, error rates, and more can all play an integral part in our operations.
- Performance of external service providers
- Time-consuming transactions.
- Cross-Application Tracking.
- Transaction Breakdown and Analysis; Overview, History and Evaluation.
New Relic offers support for languages such as Java,.NET and Ruby as well as performance monitoring for mobile applications, advanced browser performance tracking and infrastructure monitoring services.
AppDynamics
AppDynamics, an American Application Performance Management company established with its headquarters, recorded revenue of $118,000,000 with over 1000 employees currently employed.
Forbes listed AppDynamics as #9 out of the top 100 cloud companies. AppDynamics was acquired in MarchAppDynamics provides real-time performance monitoring of complex and distributed apps.
Features:
- It supports multiple languages, including Java, Node.js, PHP,.NET, Python, C++ etc.
- Alerting of critical issues when they are identified through automatic performance baseline.
- Monitoring each line of code to resolve production application performance issues.
- AppDynamics enables you to identify and address the source of any problem quickly.
- Appdynamics' alerts will allow it to detect when performance exceeds the norm.
Opsview
Opsview is a software firm founded and headquartered in Reading, England, with offices in Woburn, Massachusetts.
Opsview Application monitoring tools offer an all-encompassing view of your infrastructure, including performance data from all business applications deployed at different locations. Displaying performance information in the digital age is challenging when multiple apps exist simultaneously. Opsview's automated and unifying approach makes it simple and intuitive to use.
Features:
- Opsview monitors the health of an application and issues alerts if anything out-of-the-ordinary occurs before it impacts actual users.
- Monitoring database availability, connectivity with clients, and storage metrics.
- Opsview helps ensure business applications fulfill their Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Opsview Mobile and other Opsview products are compatible.
Dynatrace 11
Dynatrace, established in Massachusetts, the USA and employing around 2000 staffers today, had approximately 354 million dollars in revenues.
Dynatrace Application Performance Monitor (APM) monitors and manages software application performance while guaranteeing availability. Dynatrace APM also tracks all individual and business transactions at the code level for complete oversight. Monitor real-time data, application performance and cloud environment.
Features:
- Dynatrace supports both .NET and Java.
- Dynatrace APM provides code-level and end-to-end monitoring capabilities.
- Understanding the role that application performance has on business growth will enable you to provide your digital customer with a superior digital customer experience.
- Solving issues before they affect end users.
- A proactive approach has helped save both time and resources.
- Artificial intelligence can detect optimal performance issues.
Zenoss
Zenoss, a pioneering provider of hybrid application IT monitoring software and analytics solutions, was established in Texas, USA.
There are three software offerings - Zenoss Core (Open Source), Zenoss Services Dynamics (Commercial Software) and Zenoss as a Service (ZaaS). Zenoss can monitor over one million devices daily and gather 17 billion data points. Zenoss won two Forbes Awards as "Best Enterprise Software Startups" and "Best CEOs to Work for".
Features:
- Downtime Reducing Software ZENOSS' proactive application monitoring can significantly decrease downtime.
- Before it can negatively impact end users, issues must be resolved through seamless infrastructure solutions.
- Zenoss can monitor events within applications and send immediate alerts and notifications.
Dell Foglight
Dell Foglight monitors applications' performance across various technologies, such as.NET Java. The tool offers analytical dashboards for improved user experiences.
Foglight quickly detects and fixes database, virtual environment and application-related issues. Furthermore, Foglight integrates seamlessly with other tools for tracking application performance and Infrastructure performance monitoring.
Features:
- Foglight offers support for numerous languages, including Java,.NET and AJAX.
- This tool can help monitor Application Performance, database performance and storage platform performance, among others.
- This helps ensure end-user compliance with SLAs.
- Foglight records user transactions to assess the application's overall health.
Stackify Retrace
Stackify, an American-based startup founded in Kansas, reported an annual revenue of approximately $1 Million, per PC Magazine.
Furthermore, Stackify experienced a revenue increase of 300% year over year. Retrace is a performance monitoring solution offered by Stackify that serves over 1000 clients, including large and small organizations such as Xerox, Microsoft, Honeywell etc.
Features:
- The technology supports both .NET and Java frameworks.
- Retrace can adapt to many environments and is compatible with other tools.
- This APM tool is available as a SaaS and explicitly designed for developers.
- Retrace uses detailed code-level performance traces to pinpoint issues with software development projects.
- Retrace is designed to monitor the health and performance of multiple servers and applications across a network.
- Gather all information about an application stack and determine their impact on performance.
Application Insights
Microsoft was established in Washington State and now employs over 124,000 employees, boasting $90 billion in annual revenue.
Recently, they entered the Application Performance Monitoring market with Application Insights, an intuitive tool designed to provide organizations with insight into how their applications perform.
Application Insights is a tool specifically created for developers. It enables them to monitor application performance, collect data, troubleshoot issues with an application and enhance its performance.
Features:
- App Insights supports several programming languages, including .NET (C++), PHP, Ruby, Python and JavaScript.
- This software is compatible with both Android and iOS platforms.
- Application Insights allows organizations to monitor response times for various requests and CPU, network and memory utilization.
- Discovering and fixing any issue promptly are essential for long-term success.
- It provides an effective system of alerts, such as emails, response time notifications and various metrics.
- Dashboards and metrics serve to monitor an application's availability and performance.
What is the Best APM Software?
Your application performance monitoring tool must not only be user-friendly but should also offer actionable insights.
- Language Management of Applications Your applications use specific programming. languages which require management.
- Maintain code-level performance metrics.
- Track end-user experience by employing artificial intelligence.
- Monitor Your Entire Infrastructure Now.
- Provide information to assist in connecting app performance metrics to business results.
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Conclusion
As businesses undertake digital transformations such as cloud migration or container orchestration, app performance monitoring and management become more crucial.
APM programs are essential in ensuring software applications remain available, mainly if your business provides SaaS. DevOps teams use APM tools to analyze how application releases affect service performance, reliability and security - this enables couples to set alarms that detect issues before they adversely impact user experience and automate actions based on patterns, trends or specific events.
