Gone are the days when businesses were conducted face-to-face, with the majority of the work falling on the shoulders of the employees. Today, the internet has completely taken over the traditional form of business – right from buying products and services to ordering food and groceries to loan applications to shopping – everything is right at your fingertips through a myriad of apps. Hence, it has become vital for businesses to ensure that their applications are top-notch and running smoothly at all times. With positive user experience being the key, it is not surprising to see more and more organizations embracing application performance monitoring tools. In this post, find out what these tools are, what are the benefits of using them, and which of them made it to our list of the top five APM tools.
Table of Contents
What is an Application Performance Monitoring Tool?
An Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool offers a plethora of solutions to track, monitor, and gain insights about the frontend as well as the backend of the application. An APM tool is used by the organization to gather all the relevant data which is then analyzed and used to detect, diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues, thus, maintaining a smooth and seamless user experience. With the majority of the applications becoming more and more multifaceted, the need for application performance monitoring tools has only increased.
The primary functions of an APM tool include:
- Monitoring and tracking applications’ performance and response time.
- Provide the required metrics and alert the administrators when there is any performance variation.
- Provide visual data about the insights gathered.
- Provide assistance in resolving any performance issues detected.
Benefits of Using APM Tools
Here are some of the benefits of using APM tools:
- Improve the user experience
- Reduce the application downtime and increase customer satisfaction
- Improve your ranking on Google
- Boost your productivity and add in new innovations
- Reduce the amount spent on consulting experts to detect and diagnose the application issues
Five Best Application Performance Monitoring Tools
Going through all the available application performance monitoring tools is definitely tedious and time consuming. Hence, we have created this list of top five APM tools that will suit the needs of all sizes and types of businesses.
1. Retrace
Retrace is the one-stop solution for app developers, allowing them to detect bugs, diagnose and fix issues, improve the codes, and ensure that the application is performing to its maximum efficiency. This APM tool offers several features such as application monitoring, alerts and notifications through custom emails and SMS, creating custom metrics for measuring memory, network, uptime, CPU, disk utilization, etc. Retrace goes above and beyond what is expected out of an APM tool to ensure that the developers can access all the required tools from one unified platform. The bottom line is that Retrace enables developers to deploy high-performing applications and boost end user experience.
Features
Key features of Retrace include:
- Supports common frameworks like AWS, Azure, SQL Server, etc.
- Supports various frameworks like .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, etc.
- Uses code-level performance traces to identify issues.
- Integration with other third-party tools.
- Alerts and notifications to the users.
- Monitoring of page speed, real-user, synthetic transaction, web defacement, and mobile user.
- Intuitive dashboard.
- Collects metrics of application performance.
Pros
- Real-time monitoring of how the applications are performing, whether there is any downtime, whether the app crashed at any time, etc.
Cons
- Filtering of logs is cumbersome which requires users to sometimes go through unnecessary logs as well.
Pricing Plan
- Free trial
- Logs & Errors – $35/month/annually
- Retrace Essentials – $79/month/annually
- Retrace Standard – $199/month/annually
- Retrace Enterprise – Custom pricing
2. New Relic APM
New Relic APM was established in 2008 and over the past few years, it has increased its presence globally and is today considered as one of the best application performance monitoring tools currently in the market. Businesses, developers, IT support teams, etc., can use this APM platform for performance monitoring of mobile apps, infrastructure, and advanced browsers. This tool also provides deep insights and analytics that allow the users to optimize the application’s load and response time, find the root cause of any issue, etc. It offers Enterprise-grade security, real-time user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and various other features. New Relic APM is best-suited for WordPress-based businesses as it allows various monitoring features with regards to plugins, themes, WordPress hooks, etc.
Features
Key features of New Relic APM include:
- New Relic APM offers multiple dashboards to analyze the business impact.
- It provides more than 100 plugins and integrations, including Azure, MongoDB, Google Cloud, AWS, etc.
- Users can also access the tool via its mobile app which is available for Android and iOS.
- Ability to take screenshots of the errors.
- Provide metrics related to application performance.
- Various monitoring options, such as real-time user, mobile user, web defacement, API, synthetic transaction, page speed, etc.
- Access to event logs.
Pros
- New Relic APM is an easy to set up application performance monitoring tool which offers amazing and intuitive dashboards that provide a quick overview of the application’s performance.
Cons
- Compared to some of the other top APM tools, New Relic APM is more expensive and may not suit the budget of every business size.
Pricing Plan
New Relic APM offers four different plans and each of them has custom pricing depending upon the number of features you require and use.
- Forever free
- Standard – Up to 5 full users
- Pro – More than 5 full users
- Enterprise
3. AppDynamics
If you are looking for an APM tool that can provide you with end-to-end, real-time performance information about your applications, then AppDynamics is a good option. This application performance monitoring tool was acquired by Cisco in 2017 and is ideal for use by large enterprises. Apart from offering the usual features of an application performance monitoring tool, AppDynamics is also known for its AI-powered system to detect and identify issues and resolve them as soon as possible. This software also offers network monitoring solutions that help businesses identify network-related performance issues. Overall, this is an efficient APM tool that allows organizations to make informed decisions and boost their application performance.
Features
Key features of AppDynamics include:
- AppDynamics offers code-level diagnosis.
- It provides over 150 integrations, including AWS Cloud, Docker, PagerDuty, etc.
- You can use the tool to take transaction snapshots.
- Offers visibility of database, server, and applications.
- Supports various languages like .NET, Python, Java, Node.js, C++, PHP, etc.
- AppDynamics sends automatic alerts and notifications regarding the application performance.
- Monitoring of page speed, web defacement, real-user, mobile user, etc.
Pros
- One of the key advantages of using AppDynamics is that it allows the users to drill down to ground zero to gain insights and information.
Cons
- The learning curve, especially for novice users can be quite steep and complex.
Pricing Plan
- Free trial
- Infrastructure Monitoring Edition – $6/month per CPU Core
- Premium Edition – $60/month per CPU Core
- Enterprise Edition – $90/month per CPU Core
- Real User Monitoring – $.06/month per 1000 tokens
4. Dynatrace
Dynatrace, founded in 2005, is an all-in-one AI-powered solution that enables businesses to monitor, optimize, and scale their apps. This APM tool works towards monitoring the application performance and boosting its productivity and performance. Dynatrace includes everything from user-experience to server and network monitoring to application monitoring to infrastructure monitoring. Similar to some of the other top application performance monitoring tools, this platform also offers code-level diagnosis. This APM tool is ideal for use by various business types like retail, government agencies, transportation, financial markets, etc. Along with the usual APM tool features, Dynatrace also offers dependency mapping, automatic full-stack instrumentation, and AI-assisted responses to find the root cause of the discrepancies.
Features
Some of the key features of Dynatrace include:
- Code-level and end-to-end monitoring available.
- Dynatrace helps users to proactively resolve any issues before the end-user is impacted.
- It uses artificial intelligence to detect any performance issues.
- It supports Java, .NET, PHP, and Node.js.
- Offers mobile app monitoring and supports Android, iOS, PhoneGap, and Apache Cordova.
- You can use Dynatrace to replay the user experience.
- Intuitive dashboard.
- Offers application performance metrics.
- Monitoring of real-user, web defacement, mail server, and synthetic transaction.
Pros
- Dynatrace offers highly customizable dashboards which display code-level insights and various application performance metrics.
Cons
- One of the major cons of this APM tool is its costing. Compared to some of the other application performance monitoring tools, Dynatrace is more expensive.
Pricing Plan
- Free trial
- Full-stack Monitoring – $69/month
- Infrastructure Monitoring – $21/month
- Digital Experience Monitoring – $11/month
- Application Security – $10/month
- Open Ingestion – $25/month
- Cloud Automation – $0.10
5. Datadog APM
Datadog APM is an efficient application performance monitoring tool that enables businesses to perform a wide range of performance monitoring activities, including analyzing dependencies, tracking errors, removing bottlenecks, increasing code efficiency, reducing latency, optimizing the application, and more. This is another all-in-one APM tool that allows extensive monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing application performances, databases, and servers. Datadog APM is ideal for use by businesses ranging from small to medium to large enterprises. It comes with a built-in integration system which makes it easy to connect and work across various products. You can also customize the dashboards to set up your personal monitoring system to clearly visualize the application performance. This APM tool also provides machine-learning-based Watchdog.
Features
Some of the key features of Datadog APM include:
- The tool offers a unified integrated platform that enables seamless correlation between application performances and underlying infrastructure.
- You can search and analyze unlimited traces in real-time.
- Uses machine learning to identify errors.
- Highly customizable dashboards.
- More than 250 integrations, including AWS, Azure, Microsoft Team, Java, Jira, etc.
- Supports various web frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, Django, Spring, Laravel, etc.
- Monitoring of web defacement, page speed, SLA, real-user, etc.
- Alerts and notifications.
Pros
- Datadog APM allows the users to create a custom view of logs using custom filters, data parsing, etc., which can be shared with the team as well.
Cons
- This APM tool comes with a steep learning curve and will require the user to seek an expert’s help to go through the tutorials and learning sessions.
Pricing Plan
Datadog APM offers a wide range of plans, such as Infrastructure, APM & Continuous Profiler, Database Monitoring, Network Monitoring, Workload Security, etc. Each of these plans is priced differently and you can find more information about their pricing on Datadog APM’s official website.
Conclusion
Every application performance monitoring tool will have some common as well as some unique features to offer. Hence, it is recommended that you go through each of these top APM tools in detail to understand what each of them is offering and whether or not they match your business requirements. Irrespective of how big or small your business is, if you have an online presence, then you must invest in the best application performance monitoring tool to ensure that your end-users are happy and satisfied.
Check out SaaSworthy today to find out information about more software that can help your business to grow and succeed.
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