APM is one of those buzzwords that is slowly becoming a necessity. Most people are still unsure what APM means and how it can help their services. But what is it? What does it stand for? And how can it help your services or digital products? This blog will answer your questions—and more.
What Is APM?
Application performance management (APM) is the practice of monitoring and managing the performance of an application throughout its lifecycle. This includes everything from ensuring the application meets its performance goals during development and testing, to monitoring its performance in production and making changes as needed to ensure it continues to meet those goals.
A number of factors can impact the performance of an application, including the code, the infrastructure and the user experience. APM tools are designed to help identify and diagnose performance issues so that they can be resolved. APM can be used to monitor the performance of both web-based and native applications.
The Features of APM
Performance Monitoring
This involves monitoring the performance of an application in terms of response time, throughput and other metrics. This data can be used to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize application performance.
Capacity Planning
This involves forecasting future application performance needs and ensuring that adequate resources are available to meet those needs.
Performance Tuning
This involves making changes to an application to improve its performance. This may include changes to the code, architecture or infrastructure.
Problem Management
This involves troubleshooting and resolving performance issues. This may involve working with other teams, such as the network operations or database team, to identify and resolve the issue.
How Does Application Performance Monitoring Work?
Application performance monitoring primarily uses a set of metrics to measure the performance and behavior of an application. The system triggers an alert when it detects abnormalities and so notifies concerned and appropriate personnel. By monitoring performance and behavior, APM can help identify potential issues before they cause problems for users.
How APM Can Help Your Services/Applications
APM can help your services and applications in many ways. Here are just a few:
Problem Solving
APM can help you identify and solve problems. By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs), you can identify issues early on and take corrective action before they cause major problems. Additionally, APM can help you troubleshoot existing problems by providing detailed information about how your system is performing. This information can be invaluable in pinpointing the root cause of a problem so that you can fix it quickly and efficiently.
Reduced Downtime
By monitoring the performance of your services and applications, APM can help you to identify and diagnose any issues that might arise, avoiding downtime for critical business applications. Monitoring can help you to avoid potential problems and keep your services running smoothly.
Insightful Metrics
APM can also help you to improve the performance of your services and applications. By using metrics to identify areas where your services are performing poorly, you can make changes to improve performance. APM can also provide you with valuable insights into how your services and applications are being used. By understanding how your customers are using your services, you can make changes to improve the overall experience.
Reduced Operational Costs
Finally, APM can help you to save time and money. APM can reduce your operational costs reducing the need for employees with specialized skills and the number of personnel hours required to analyze, monitor and report on services.
By monitoring your services and applications, you can also avoid potential problems that could lead to costly downtime. This also increases the overall quality of your business and the products you offer.
How APM as a Service Is Helping Advancements in Technology
APM as a Service is a new way of managing and monitoring applications that is helping to drive advancements in technology. By using APM as a Service, organizations can more efficiently and effectively monitor and manage their applications, which leads to better performance and stability.
In addition, APM as a Service provides organizations with more insight into how their applications are performing, which can help to identify and fix issues more quickly. As a result, APM as a Service is helping to make applications more reliable and efficient and is driving advancements in technology.
Types of APM Monitoring Tools
App Metrics–Based APM
Several tools use various server and app metrics and call it APM. At best they can tell you how many requests your app gets and potentially which URLs might be slow. Since they don’t do code-level profiling, they can’t tell you why.
Code-Level Performance APM
Progress Flowmon, Stackify Retrace, New Relic, AppDynamics and Dynatrace are the typical type of APM products you think of, based on code profiling and transaction tracing.
Tools To Help You Get Started With APM
There are many tools that can help you get started with APM. Some of these are designed to help you collect data about your application's performance, while others help you analyze that data and identify potential problems. Still others are designed to help you fix those problems.
Which tools you need will depend on your particular application and on your own skills and knowledge. But there are some basic tools that most people will need, including a data collection tool and a performance analysis tool.
- Progress Flowmon
- AppDynamics APM – Performance analytics across the full application stack
- Datadog APM – SaaS-based platform
- Instana – Enterprise observability platform
- Gibraltar Software Loupe – Log aggregation and analytics platform
Getting started with APM can be a challenge, but with the right tools, you can overcome that challenge and start improving your application's performance.
Application Performance Management vs. Monitoring: How Do They Differ?
Application performance management (APM) and monitoring are two important but distinct approaches to improving the performance of software applications. APM focuses on identifying and addressing the root causes of performance problems, while monitoring provides visibility into the real-time behavior of an application.
APM tools typically provide comprehensive performance visibility, from the application code to the underlying infrastructure. This visibility can help identify issues such as slow database queries, inefficient code and network latency. APM tools also often include features such as application tracing and profiling, which can provide even more granular insight into performance bottlenecks.
Monitoring tools, on the other hand, provide less comprehensive visibility, but can be useful for quickly identifying issues that are impacting application performance. Monitoring tools typically focus on monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as response time and error rates. By monitoring these KPIs, it can be possible to identify issues such as overloaded servers or slow network connections. Progress WhatsUp Gold contains an add-on module that is specifically designed to monitor application KPIs.
Final Words
It’s important to have a good understanding of the different types of monitoring, including APM. A tool like Flowmon or WhatsUp Gold can support your efforts.