What is APM?
An Overview of Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) is the practice of diagnosing and optimizing an application's performance to ensure fast, smooth, and error-free operation. APM helps organizations measure key metrics and use monitoring software to track performance, optimize service response times, and improve user experiences.

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What is APM-Site24x7

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

Topology maps in APM - Site24x7

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 key transaction using APM - Site24x7

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

Distributed tracing in APM - Site24x7

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

Monitor & analyze errors with APM - Site24x7

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

APM tool with custom metrics - Site24x7

Enabling developers to customize application-specific metrics ensures they can evaluate performance bottlenecks and tweak the existing codebase.

Milestone Markers

APM tool with milestone marker feature - Site24x7

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

Rule based alerting using APM - Site24x7

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

APM assisted with AI - Site24x7

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:

Application Response Time and Throughput
  • Are there any seasonal patterns in response time or throughput?
  • Did the latest update affect your application performance?
Monitoring application response time in APM- Site24x7
  • 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?
APM Monitoring Tools - Apdex Score - Site24x7
  • How often does your application crash?
  • Does it happen sporadically or does it occur frequently?
  • Can you trace the exact root cause via logs?
Exception count and Error rate
  • 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?
APM Tools-Components and integrations-Site24x7
  • 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?
APM Monitoring Tools-Scalability-Site24x7
APM Tools-Response Time and Throughput-Site24x7

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.

Benefits of APM- Site24x7

Who uses APM monitoring tools?

DevOps

An 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 Admins

APM tools provide a bird's eye view of application topology, making it easier to identify unresponsive nodes instantly. Alerting systems and anomaly detection provide the edge IT admins need to respond to critical events faster.

Operations

APM tools aggregate performance metrics over a long period of time, and provide a quick snapshot of performance-intensive operations. This enables operations teams to identify areas of improvement based on historic trends in application behavior.

Quality Assurance

Ensuring 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.

Developers

APM 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

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minfytech
Perfekt
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justaftermidnight
Umbrella Infocare
happiest-mind

What to expect from an APM tool?

According to Gartner, "APM is a suite of monitoring software comprising digital experience monitoring, application discovery, tracing, and diagnostics and purpose built AI for IT operations."

Originally used to merely monitor performance metrics, APM tools have come a long way in accordance with the trends in application development. In a nutshell, present-day APM tools should be able to integrate well with other aspects of monitoring, have robust tracing mechanisms, and aid in proactive monitoring with the help of anomaly detection and forecasting.

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

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