Application Performance Monitoring

An application is not just a small part of any business. It would be wise enough to say that an application itself is a company’s business in today’s digital world. This is the reason why application performance monitoring problems are the biggest hurdle for IT Teams and the growth of any business. 

Customer expectations from the application’s performance are changing every day. Today, customers don’t have patience and want to use any application flawlessly. Any problem they see must be fixed in real-time if a company wants to keep that customer. 

With the advancement of the IT sector, Technology is evolving faster than the consumer’s expectations, thanks to the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) space that has made this digital world a bit easier for businesses. Understanding APM can be a challenging task, but we will try to make it as simple as we can. 

Let’s see what APM is and how it optimizes IT operations and helps to grow any business. 

What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application Performance Monitoring gives solutions to businesses to check if their IT environment is up to the performance standards; capable of identifying bugs and potential errors, and can provide flawless experiences to the user. The best APM solutions provider gives information to the IT teams that can help them to connect their app performance to business outcomes, and identify and resolve issues that impact the performance before it is seen by the end-user and in terms of technology, we can say, reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Application performance monitoring is often confused with “Application Performance Management (APM).” As the name suggests, it refers to managing the excellence of App performance; monitoring is just a part of this management. 

APM solutions not only detect a problem but also tell the IT team, when and where in their app, the users will see this problem and why it has occurred so that it can be fixed in the future. This is why Application Performance Management holds significant value for IT teams.

APM tools, such as Stackify Retrace, provide code-level insights along with integrated logging to identify more issues in QA and continuously observe applications in production environments.

With Retrace, development teams are able to proactively catch problems in non-production environments that go beyond functional testing to fix issues before end users are impacted.

What do APM solutions focus on?

The best way to make a user’s experience flawless is to understand the status of any business transaction that drives through your app in real-time. In simple words, we can say that end-to-end monitoring of any app performance by:

1. Checking if the app is working normally
2. If it is not normal, alert the problem source and collect all data from it. This source can be an app, some dependencies of an app, or infrastructure supporting the app)
3. Thoroughly checking the data w.r.t its impact on the growth of the business
4. Adapt to your application environment to resolve problems before they attack the business

Application Performance Management keeps a track of all the information that plays a small to a big role in an app. Let us look at some common application performance monitoring metrics: 

• APM tests CPU usage at the server level in addition to testing memory demands and disk read/write speeds to check if the CPU usage is not impacting the performance of the app. 
• APM tracks Error rates at the software level to check how often application performance fails to satisfy the customer. For example, errors during website requests or during memory-involved processes like searching a database.
• APM keeps track of the average Response time to check if the speed is impacting the performance of the app or not. 
• Check the Number of servers running at one time. For cloud-based applications, APM checks the number of server or app instances running at any one time. APM solutions supporting autoscaling in such cases can be a cost-effective solution to your app testing service. 
• Metrics also checks the Request rates to keep a track of any spikes, request inactivity, or numbers of users at one time. 
• APM monitors uptime to monitor if the app is available and online in order to be in compliance with SLAs.
• If you are working on Java or any other programming language, you must be aware of the Garbage collection (GC) and potential errors that occur due to the heavy usage of the memory. This is one of the most overlooked performance problems that must be fixed. 
• The most important metric is customer satisfaction. For any business to grow, customer satisfaction should be the key. 

By combining results from various app testing, Application Performance Management saves IT, teams and professionals, from a plethora of manual testing or building monitors synthetically. 

Why is Application Performance Monitoring important?

Let’s check the scenario without an APM solution, you need to manage application performance using:

Scenario 1. Synthetic transactions. If you are planning to go by this approach, then you must figure out how you’ll be notified of new issues. How would you work on normal and abnormal slowdowns or find the source of problems quickly?

Scenario 2. Manual instrumentation. IT professionals face a lot of issues when adding performance monitoring code to an app. If you are following the Manual Instrumentation approach, you must figure out the ways to know which code to instrument? How to maintain the code? What will you do if you plan to add more metrics while monitoring?  

Scenario 3. No company wants Customers to alert them to their app’s problems. Without an APM solution, no company can take a proactive approach to fix performance issues.

None of these scenarios can help you find the error and its solution without an APM. It is not possible to protect your resources. To provide complete support, you need a systemic approach to APM, and the best way to do that is to look for solutions with a proven result. 

Some Useful tricks for a successful Application Program Monitoring 

• APM is a brilliant app testing service provided you choose the right tools. 
• Create the right set of rules customized as per business challenges. Rules like what is called “normal”, deviation from SLA compliance, threshold levels, etc. 
• Well-trained customers, developers, people who deploy APM and know the app inside-out to fix the error as they arise. 

But the best results are seen when APM is followed by the entire organization. Everyone should understand the importance of a close relationship between the application performance and the growth of a business. Combine efforts of skilled IT professionals, a proper collaboration between the departments, and strong support from the vendor’s team, and experienced APM support— and concluding line — success.

Final Words

Application Performance Monitoring can be a relief to your business only when you know how to do it in the right way. Try adopting the best APM solutions with the right set of tools to experience the true power of APM, incorporating all the key traits of APM discussed above.  Netreo can help you do it right. Request a Demo Today!