What Is Application Performance Management (APM)?

What is APM? Explained

How does APM work?

Application performance management tools monitor the transaction speeds of end-users, systems, and network infrastructure to detect bottlenecks and potential service interruptions. APM allows system administrators to identify and diagnose the root cause of performance problems more efficiently, which helps to ensure a consistent level of service.

How do I benefit from APM?

Adopting an integrated APM solution provides a comprehensive view of the performance metrics of business-critical applications. APM tools provide real-time performance issue alerts and generate reports that offer data related to performance analysis that helps IT teams repair, improve, or update application software.

What are APM tools?

APM tools include monitoring solutions that track various components of two types of performance metrics: the performance that users experience, including load and response times during peak usage, and the capacity of computational resources, which helps establish a baseline for performance and identifies possible bottleneck locations.

Key monitoring features of APM tools

Synthetic monitoring

Synthetic monitoring is an active approach that helps to ensure optimal performance and availability by using behavior scripts to simulate user paths to predict or detect application performance issues. Monitor end-to-end transaction performance, establish metric baselines for performance, and benchmark the competition through synthetic transaction tracing.

Real user monitoring

Real user monitoring allows visual monitoring of web applications from a user's perspective. Gain deeper insight on regional variability, page load times, response times, and errors via data recorded from actual user interaction. End-user experience monitoring helps to ensure quality service by rapidly detecting performance issues and reducing MTTR.

IoT monitoring

Users often access applications via mobile devices which can necessitate another layer of troubleshooting. IoT monitoring provides a unified view of connected device applications, helps manage Javascript and C/C++ apps, and reports performance diagnostics and usage analytics that can help IT teams rapidly diagnose and address performance problems.

Infrastructure monitoring

An application is only as effective as its infrastructure. Infrastructure monitoring provides the data necessary to evaluate issues with the web server, database, or network before they have a negative impact on customers. Monitoring machine-level metrics helps to ensure that your application is fully supported by existing infrastructure.

Server monitoring

Server monitoring involves collecting metrics that relate to infrastructure, such as Disk I/O, CPU utilization, memory usage, and throughput, to gain insight on web and application servers. Server monitoring facilitates troubleshooting by providing code level details as well as data that allows IT operations to track server metrics and trends over time.

Network monitoring

Network monitoring improves network visibility on-premises and across SaaS deployments to evaluate how the network effects application performance. Gaining a greater understanding of performance and the interdependencies between application and network topology can help reduce MTTR by improving the ease of collaboration between application and network teams.

Database monitoring

Identify database-related issues and visualize end-to-end application performance with database monitoring tools and alerts. Tracking performance metrics including top users, objects, and programs, along with the ability to review execution plans for slow SQL, provides valuable insights that allow teams to isolate bottlenecks.

Cloud monitoring

Cloud monitoring allows you to assess the health of cloud-based assets and infrastructure by providing metrics down to the business transaction and code level. As the popularity of cloud-based software rises, the need for an effective cloud monitoring strategy that assesses true performance and business impact increases as well.