Why You Need An Application Performance Monitoring Tool

What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?

APM stands for Application Performance Monitoring which is a critical set of tools and practices designed to ensure the optimal functioning of software applications. These tools focus on a holistic view of the entire stack to allow users to proactively identify and resolve issues. Poor application performance can have significant economic implications, potentially resulting in decreased user engagement, customer dissatisfaction, and revenue loss. APM tools mitigate these risks by enabling organizations to prevent issues, maintain consistent service levels, and make informed decisions based on accurate performance data. The majority of APM tools possess the following key features:

• Real-time Monitoring: APM tools continuously monitor the performance of applications in real-time, providing up-to-the-moment insights into various metrics such as response times, latency, throughput, and error rates.
• Anomaly Detection: Advanced APM tools incorporate machine learning and AI algorithms to detect abnormal patterns in application behavior. This helps identify performance anomalies and potential issues that might not be captured by traditional threshold-based alerts.
• Database Performance Analysis: APM tools often integrate with databases to monitor their performance and query execution times. This is crucial for identifying slow database queries that can impact application performance.
• End-to-End Visibility: APM tools offer a comprehensive view of the entire application stack, from the front-end user interfaces to the back-end servers, databases, and external services. This end-to-end visibility allows for a better understanding of how different components interact and impact overall performance.
• Transaction Tracing: Transaction tracing is a critical feature that enables tracking the journey of a user request as it flows through the application's various components. This helps pinpoint exactly where performance bottlenecks or errors are occurring.

What Is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and How Does It Utilze APM?

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a practice that applies software engineering principles to streamline and automate crucial IT operations tasks that would traditionally require manual intervention from systems administrators. By utilizing coding and software development techniques, SRE aims to ensure the consistent and efficient functioning of websites, applications, and IT infrastructure.

In SRE, various technologies and tools are employed to automate routine tasks, such as system monitoring, capacity planning, error detection and recovery, and deployment of updates or patches. By automating these operations, SRE minimizes the need for human intervention, reduces the risk of human error, and enables faster response times in resolving issues.

Monitoring plays a vital role in SRE automation. Through the use of monitoring tools (such as an APM solution), SRE teams continuously collect performance and operational data from various systems and services. This data is then analyzed to identify potential issues or bottlenecks before they can cause disruptions or service degradation. Automated monitoring systems can provide real-time alerts, enabling SRE teams to quickly address and resolve any emerging problems.

What Is The Difference Between Application Performance Monitoring and Observability?

Application performance monitoring (APM) and observability both aim to gather software application performance data (logs, metrics and traces, most often) and examine this data to highlight potential performance issues. However, despite their similarities, they differ in terms of how they gather and analyze data.

Application performance monitoring primarily focuses on collecting specific predetermined metrics and data points, such as response times, CPU usage, and memory utilization. It offers a narrower, more structured view of the application's performance. APM tools gather this data from numerous sources, including performance counters, logs, and resource usage statistics. The gathered information is then analyzed using predefined rules and thresholds to identify any performance problems. APM solutions often have built-in dashboards and visualization tools to present the collected data in a user-friendly format.

On the other hand, observability is a broader concept that encompasses both monitoring and a deeper understanding of the application's internal behavior. Observability aims to provide a more holistic view of the application's performance by offering detailed insights into its internal workings, even when specific metrics or data points have not been predefined. Observability achieves this by instrumenting the application code to capture extensive telemetry data, including logs, events, traces, and other contextual information.

Unlike traditional monitoring, observability allows developers and operators to explore the system state and performance from various angles. It emphasizes the ability to ask new questions, explore different scenarios, and gain an in-depth understanding of how the application behaves in real-world conditions. Instead of focusing solely on predefined metrics, observability enables teams to dive into the unknown to address the unknown unknowns.

Why You Need An APM Tool

To answer why your organisation needs an APM tool, this article will outline a range of benefits that the adoption of an APM tool provides. As well as, delving into some specific examples and scenarios of how your organisation can leverage this type of tool.

Issue Identification and Diagnosing Errors

APM tools provide insights into the root causes of performance issues. When an application experiences slow response times or errors, APM tools help pinpoint where the problem is occurring, whether it's in the application code, a database query, a third-party service, or elsewhere. This accelerates the troubleshooting process and reduces downtime.

For example, if you have a mobile banking app, and some users are encountering intermittent errors when transferring funds. An APM tool can track the user journey through the app and identify the exact point where errors are occurring. This allows your development team to investigate the issue, debug the code, and release a fix to prevent future errors.

User Experience Optimisation

APM tools allow you to monitor user experience metrics such as page load times, transaction success rates, and user interactions. By analyzing this data, you can identify areas where improvements are needed to enhance user satisfaction and engagement.

As an example, for a music streaming app, users could be complaining about songs frequently buffering. With an APM tool, you can track the time it takes for audio content to load and play. If you find certain geographical regions experiencing longer loading times, you can optimize content delivery networks (CDNs) to ensure smoother streaming for users in those areas.

Component Monitoring

Sometimes referred to as application component deep dive, component monitoring applies to all in-depth monitoring of resources connected to an application. This could be anything that is touching the application, such as servers, network components, OS’s and application components. Also, these analytics are vital for predicting and rectifying potential future issues. They can also help identify, discover, and fix performance issues by comparing historical data and highlighting areas for potential improvement. Finally, this data will need interpretation and analysis to derive a clear meaning,

Scaling Resources and Capacity Planning

APM tools help in capacity planning by providing data on resource utilization trends over time. This data helps organizations predict when they might need to scale their infrastructure to accommodate increasing user loads or prevent potential performance bottlenecks.

For example, during a flash sale event, your online retail platform experiences a surge in traffic. An APM tool can monitor the resource utilization of your servers and databases. If you notice that your servers are approaching their limits, the tool can trigger alerts, prompting you to scale up your infrastructure temporarily to handle the increased load and prevent slowdowns.

What Is The Future of APM In Terms of Combining Observability and Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

The future of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) lies in the integration of observability and artificial intelligence (AI) through a concept known as AIOps. This integration aims to create a self-sustaining infrastructure that can identify and resolve performance issues without human intervention, ultimately optimizing application performance and enhancing the user experience.

By combining real-time observability telemetry with AI and automation, AIOps enables the prediction and prevention of application performance issues based on system outputs. This proactive approach allows for the identification of potential problems before they impact operations or user experience. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, AIOps can analyze vast amounts of data and patterns to accurately predict performance issues.

Furthermore, AIOps goes beyond just identifying potential problems; it actively takes actions to optimize application performance. Leveraging automation capabilities, AIOps can implement corrective measures to address performance issues and ensure that the infrastructure operates at peak efficiency. These actions can range from adjusting resource allocation to identifying optimization opportunities and implementing them autonomously.

The seamless integration of observability and AI in AIOps not only enhances the overall performance of the system but also reduces the reliance on manual intervention. This automation-driven approach allows IT operations teams to focus on higher-level tasks while the infrastructure self-heals and self-optimizes.

In summary, the future of APM involves leveraging the power of observability and AI to create AIOps, leading to a self-sustaining infrastructure that predicts and prevents performance issues, optimizes application performance, and enhances the user experience, all without the need for manual management intervention.

APM Tools

Now that you’re aware of why your organisation needs to incorporate an APM tool and the benefits that they provide. We will now outline some of the leading APM tools currently on the market to enable you to make the most appropriate choice.

Datadog

One of the most popular apm tools, Datadog provides full-stack visibility into application, cloud-based platforms and servers. Datadog features powerful user experience monitoring, allowing the user to observe network timing, transactions and more. The tool alse enables notifications of problems across the entire software stack.

Logit.io

Logit.io platform offers fully open APM and trace analytics without vendor lock-in, or data egress fees, and displays transparent easy to understand billing. Logit.io allows application developers to install code faster by spending less time on manual analysis of distributed logs, traces, and metrics. The platform also improves testing quality for QAs that need to identify application bottlenecks and perform load testing across various components.

Logit.io is significantly more cost-effective than many other application performance monitoring platforms. This means that you can log all your data without compromise. Also, with economical highly available SLAs and 20% off any annual subscription, you can make the switch towards full observability and scalability with ease, affordably.

New Relic APM

New Relic is one of the industry leaders in application performance management. Potentially the most significant feature is the extremely vivid visualization it offers of the entire stack. Also, New Relic has another unique feature, WordPress-specific functionality. This works by, when you set up New Relic on a WordPress site, it opens up several new monitoring features that let you easily keep tabs on WordPress hooks, plugins, and themes.

If you found this article informative then why not read about application monitoring best practices or what is telemetry?