Let’s start with the little basics!

What is Application Performance Management (APM)?

Application Performance Management, or we can say APM is an act of managing software applications’ overall performance to monitor performance issues, availability, and transaction times, potentially impacting the user experience.

APM tools’ significant features comprise synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, IoT monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, server monitoring, network monitoring, database monitoring, and cloud monitoring.

APM – no more hot potato!

Businesses of all sizes have struggled to deploy monitoring and analytics solutions to maintain the rapid pace of shift and major architectural shifts in their application stack. Traditional APM solutions have been very complex and cannot keep up with the complexity of agile development and highly complex architectures and environments.

Business runs on applications, and when their performance suffers, so do you. Could you afford to let poor user experience affect your success?

APM is a one-stop-solution for organizations that depend on applications – whether deployed on-premises in the public cloud or through software-as-a-service (SaaS) models – to support everything from communications to productivity and your business transactions.

When one cannot detect, identify, and resolve app slowdowns, then there are chances that your organization could lose user confidence and trust, reduced productivity, and even lose revenue.

Just think about it – when was the last time you experienced an app issue? Did you inform the company? Or did you simply move to their competitor?

Here come APM solutions that enhance user experience and resolve issues before users knew they happened.

How APM makes it look easy:

  • Enhances the performance of your database and the applications.
  • Delivers comprehensive end-user experience monitoring both outside and inside the firewall, allowing you to use a mix of synthetic transactions and real-user monitoring to make sure your users get the best experience possible.
  • Provides comprehensive health and performance monitoring of traditional and SaaS commercial applications.
  • Allows deep performance insights into custom applications, helping gather custom metrics, trace transactions across dynamic and distributed environments, and profiles the application code.

APM solution designed for modern software-defined business

It has been said that the Application Intelligence Platform and five architectural innovations redefine Application Performance Monitoring. Let’s check it out –

  • Monitor what matters to your client and their end-users: here, APM solutions focus on bottom-up health metrics monitoring for discrete application components, including servers, web servers, databases, and application servers. Monitoring business transactions allows one to know if the functionality is presently available and the primary cause of an issue.
  • Managing application traffic into company transactions aligns the requests with the software applications’ essential functions – satisfying and engaging the user. This is all done automatically with the help of APM solutions.
  • Smartly recognizes irregularities with dynamic baselines for business transactions and all infrastructure components and applications it monitors. One of the best examples is AppDynamics. AppDynamics monitors every single business transaction and automatically develops and learns a dynamic baseline for an end-to-end response.

Benefits of AppDynamics for a multi-cloud world include:

  • Identifying problems with real-time monitoring before they impact consumers.
  • Gaining end-to-end visibility to plan with accuracy, validate success, and migrate with confidence.
  • Unlocking the power of machine learning (ML) to boost and automate root-cause diagnosis.
  • Driving business results via advanced application performance.

Nemo Hajiyusuf, Software Engineering Manager, Alaska Airlines, commented: “With AppDynamics, our mean time to detection went from hours to less than 10 minutes, which is a huge win for us.”

How could Ops teams leverage APM to meet modern requirements?

Several components of SaaS and cloud technology are beneficial, but the hairball of hybrid IT is anything but applications as applications have become the backbone of businesses and their success. If code fails, apps break. If the network fails, apps break. If security fails, apps break. If infrastructure fails, apps break. If the database fails, apps break. So how do you make sure you don’t fail and don’t break.

When essential services are decentralized, application owners monitor the system that still works without root access to the whole stack with Application Performance Management.

“Like any technology approach, APM has been getting better, faster, cheaper, and more integrated across a larger set of systems than just the most important.”

Requirements of 21st century APM solutions

Modern applications need modern APM solutions –

21st-century requirement no. 1: a single pane of glass

21st-century requirement no. 2: APM everywhere

21st-century requirement no. 3: service-level visibility and actionability

21st-century requirement no. 4: collaboration and coordination

For instance, the SolarWinds APM Suite—Pingdom, AppOptics, and Loggly—combines user experience monitoring with personalized metrics, distributed tracing, log management, code analysis, and log analytics to offer unmatched visibility into modern applications.

Takeaway

It’s important to use APM today because it is better at removing the visibility gaps across the end-to-end experience and creating a single pane of glass. Also, it makes it possible to rapidly translate the impact of any issues to both technical and business team members.

One requires an APM with a consistent capability, great integration, easy to implement, and most importantly, available at a reasonable cost.

In 2019 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring, Gartner states, “Enterprises will quadruple their application performance monitoring due to increasingly digitized processes from 2018 through 2021 to reach 20% of all business applications.”

To gather more knowledge on the subject, download our latest whitepapers on app management solutions.