Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools

Buyer's Guide on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools

What is Application Performance Monitoring Software?

Living in a digital era in which speed and efficiency are everything, one not only needs to keep up with the competition but in fact to stay ahead of it as well. There is no space for an organization or individual who is inefficient or slow in utilizing the various digital resources such as applications. You cannot afford to waste any time being slow while handling an application as it might badly affect your business productivity and hence your brand name. The performance and growth of leading IT industries today are heavily dependent on good application monitoring tools that look after the entire application infrastructure of an organization. IT systems have been providing data to system admins for several decades to help identify problems and keep everything under control.

However, over the past few years, the data-based system has widely expanded covering a lot of dimensions. Keeping this in mind, developers built Application Performance Monitoring tools to watch over the application behavior. Having an effective APM software not only controls time delay but also improves a company's performance by identifying and fixing any errors in the system. A faulty system is never trustworthy in the long run and can highly affect customer loyalty and employee productivity. Gradually, organizations are undertaking more transformational initiatives to boost business growth such as container orchestration, cloud migration, and other microservices. All applications rely on multiple kinds of hardware and software to function properly, therefore, an efficient APM monitoring software must be able to cut across all boundaries and provide a detailed analysis of end-user experience. IT sectors are under a lot of pressure to perform their best. For instance, an IT company failing in the e-commerce business could lead to a shopping cart failure online which in turn would lead to the economic failure of the company. In this case, APM apps can be used to detect performance degradation and rectify it before it severely impacts the organization.

Key Features of Application Performance Monitoring Software

In today’s growing economic demands, faulty systems, and performance delays are not an option for business enterprises. Instant notifications and fixing of issues are essential for long term sustenance of any organization. As a result, APM platforms are increasing in demand and popularity day by day. Its key features include:

• Web request and transaction performance: APM tools enable users to track the performance of every transaction and web request in the application. This helps in understanding which web requests are the slowest, which ones should be improved, and which ones are being viewed the most.
• Real user monitoring: These days, most applications use a lot of Javascript, which makes it essential for users to monitor the duration required by the web page to load fully as well as render the web pages. In this case, real user monitoring becomes an essential feature of APM that helps users to analyze and monitor the application thoroughly. An ideal APM platform would also evaluate whether a particular user can access all the tools and resources provided by the application on-the-go.
• Code-level performance profiling: It is crucial to understand the root cause of the issues whenever the system fails to work properly, and one of the common ways of doing that is by getting down and analyzing errors from the code level. APM software helps users to track the application performance to the code level and gain a better insight into the causes and fix problems accordingly.

Why Should You Use Application Performance Monitoring Software?

An application performance monitoring platform is responsible for detecting and reporting errors in performance to enable smooth operation of services and guarantee client satisfaction. Therefore, for any industry to survive successfully, effective APM software is required to analyze and enhance performance. Not having an APM tool installed in the system prevents issues from being highlighted which contributes to performance delay and sometimes the errors, as a result of being unnoticed over a long period of time cannot be fixed again. Also, APM tools send immediate alerts in the form of notifications to the users as soon as any error is detected. Apart from detecting and fixing errors, this software also assists in enhancing the end-user experience which can be deployed in various production environments and manage multiple forms of technologies. Overall, APM solutions are known for real-time monitoring and robust reporting which not only pinpoints errors instantly but also addresses the issues before users experience a faulty system and performance problems. Therefore, it is important for every organization to implement an effective APM application to enhance productivity and performance drastically.

Benefits of Application Performance Monitoring Software

With a vast multitude of options that one can obtain from APM platforms, here is a brief list of the many benefits that they come with -

• Reduces revenue risk: Customer loyalty is the most important factor for any company to sustain itself. The economy is in high demand these days and thus losing customers is not an option. For instance, during the festive season when there is a shopping frenzy a faulty eCommerce system will lead to a decrease in sales. In such cases, APM software is beneficial for quickly identifying issues and fixing them before it affects the clients.
• Improves business continuity: Downtime is the worst situation for any business as it can lead to revenue loss and reputation damage as well as decreased productivity and loss of customer satisfaction. Organizations invest in APM services as it improves the levels of business continuity by efficient troubleshooting of errors and upgrading and changing the internal infrastructure of the application.
• Enhanced Customer Experience: APM helps in generating customer loyalty and satisfaction. Through real-time monitoring and identification of errors, APM allows companies to stay ahead in the competition by increasing productivity and performance as a result of which customers remain unaffected by the issues.
• Fosters Innovation: No industry likes to deal with a lot of fire drills. APM tools foster proactive knowledge exchange and collaboration with different departments such as Application development, operations, and DevOps. Therefore, recurring issues are resolved more swiftly without insignificant fire drills.
• High Google Ranking: One of the greatest benefits of this software is that it always helps the applications to rank higher on the Google search result pages. If a particular application performs very well with improved end-user experience the application is expected to be ranked well in search results which provides a boost to the brand reputation.
• Server Monitoring: Application problems are so prevalent these days and in some cases, it also becomes crucial to monitor the memory and CPU. With APM services users can fix errors pertaining to the server CPU and other metrics.

Who is Using Application Performance Monitoring Software?

IT teams: The monitoring of application performance is vital in the field of system management and information technology as performance is the most important factor for maintaining brand loyalty and client satisfaction. Disruption in performance is a major drawback that IT teams must prevent to avoid loss of clients. APM services provide real-user monitoring which helps in identifying the loading speed of a web page. If a web page is very slow it automatically affects application performance which needs to be checked. Also, developers can utilize these tools to monitor which web pages are being accessed or viewed the most and based on this, marketing and business strategies may be improved accordingly.

Top Factors To Consider Before Buying Application Performance Monitoring Tool

APM software can detect problems in the management system beforehand which prevents long term errors that may damage the company’s reputation. Every industry works with different kinds of systems that operate on various types of hardware and software. So before users can start working with an APM tool it is important to understand the requirements of a company and how the software can benefit them. This basic guide highlights the few important aspects to consider before buyers can purchase an APM software that will be suitable for their business.

• Type and functionality: The APM ecosystem is pretty complex so before using this software it is important to understand the functionality of its different categories. The most important point to know is which type of monitoring software does it support. Some support synthetic monitoring which means they analyze application behavior to identify potential threats and optimize performance. Others perform real-user monitoring which is based on data collected from real users. Many tools can support both.
• Transaction Performance Tracking: Some APM tools perform transaction tracing which provides information about a specific action in the application in detail. This technique was previously used by developers to identify application bugs which have now emerged as an important feature of such software as it helps system admins to figure out why a particular part of the system is not functioning adequately.
• Cost Analysis: In recent years, developers have started to offer another important feature of APM software known as cost analysis. This feature helps organizations to avoid unnecessary infrastructure costs by identifying systems that are underutilized such as a data volume running on cloud that no longer has any applications connected to it.
• Automated Response: One of the most interesting features of modern APM tools is the automated response that uses machine learning to take action whenever it detects a problem in the system. But automated response can't solve every problem like human admins but they can help admins to solve more complex issues that can not be solved automatically.