Application Performance Monitoring: A Guide to Understanding

Technological advancements and growing reliance on digital platforms have led to the growth of software applications for businesses. Enterprises must explore and use web applications to interact with the market and end users. Hence, it is essential to stand out in an overwhelming digital presence of companies.

Companies work with a complete development team to ensure an effective digital presence. While web app development is a significant task at hand, as a developer at a web application development company, performance monitoring is an essential aspect of your work. It is a way to measure and improve app performance, ensuring enterprises meet user demand successfully.

In this article, we will explore the concept of application performance monitoring (APM). We will also expand on its practical applications, benefits, and challenges.

Read along to understand the importance of application performance monitoring and its potential role for businesses in the future.

APM stands for application performance monitoring. It refers to the tools and practices that support a developer to investigate and solve any performance problems of a web application. The goal is to monitor application performance by collecting data from real-time interactions of an end user with an app.

It enables developers to proactively monitor and resolve issues within the IT environment, ensuring a reliable and smooth customer experience for end users. APM is a part of a broader concept called application performance management that mainly focuses on tracking the application performance.

Performance monitoring is crucial for businesses as it enables IT professionals to solve complex application performance problems. Since enterprises require uninterrupted connections with their customers, they require applications to function smoothly. Timely solutions to issues ensure constant application availability.

In a highly competitive digital market, businesses must stay vigilant and proactive. Application performance monitoring is a way to ensure a flawless user experience at all times.

Hence, APM is important to optimize user experience, proactively identify and resolve bottlenecks, improve application scalability, facilitate root cause analysis, and enhance resource utilization. It supports developmental operations, enabling developers to build a robust IT environment.

Application performance monitoring tools rely on multiple features to ensure the smooth running of apps. Gartner’s APM conceptual framework aligns the key features that comprise the core performance monitoring aspects.

Let’s look at the five components highlighted in the APM conceptual framework.

1. End-user experience

End-user experience monitoring is an essential component of APM. The high-priority metric highlights a user’s point of view when using a software application. It is also known as real user monitoring, as the user-based data helps to understand application performance and potential sources of problems.

The metric of end-user experience defines the basis of performance trending of an application and assists in predictive analysis. It enables an enterprise to efficiently deal with faults in their app and study the impact of the solutions. The end-user experience is tracked using two techniques, which include:

Active monitoring

It is also known as agentless monitoring, where data probes are used to analyze the traffic. It enables performance monitoring throughout the architecture. It also reveals the client’s location, operating system, and browser.

Passive monitoring

Its other name is synthetic monitoring, which relies on probes and bots that enable the users to report on system availability or other problems. It is also used to monitor service-level agreements. Paired with active monitoring, synthetic monitoring offers valuable insight for an application even in low-traffic hours.

Hence, end-user monitoring is important to ensure a high-quality user experience. It enables businesses to get user feedback and actively address any highlighted issues.

2. Runtime application architecture

It is focused on monitoring the application architecture. You can refer to it as infrastructure monitoring, as it analyzes an application's hardware and software components. It also monitors the path of communication between both, using dependency mappings.

Hence, infrastructure monitoring aims to understand the complete topology of an application and its interconnections. A clear picture of infrastructure components in the topology makes performance monitoring and problem detection easier.

3. Business transactions

It is also known as user-defined transaction profiling. It is focused on analyzing the flow of every user transaction to highlight the ones that faced performance issues. This time of performance monitoring is also termed as tracing a user’s interaction with the app, which is tracked from frontend to backend.

The component then recreates the problematic user interactions to test and understand the cause of issues the user faces. It enables the developer to trace a transaction's events through all network components, highlighting each stage of it through them.

It is helpful in providing actionable insights, optimizing application performance, and ensuring effective troubleshooting in complex application environments. It also highlights any third-party integrations that impact an application’s performance.

4. Deep-dive component monitoring (DDCM)

The other name for it is the application component, deep dive. It tracks all application components within an IT infrastructure. Proactively monitoring all used resources and experienced events within the app performance infrastructure ensures an analysis of all servers, operations systems, and network components.

5. Analytics/reporting

This stage of the conceptual framework aims to collect data from the previous processes and translate it into useful information. By identifying usage patterns, performance issues, and trends, developers can deal with issues and build a better plan proactively.

The processed information is used for the following:

• Using old and new data to define a performance baseline as an expectation for normal application behavior
• Comparison of infrastructure and performance changes to identify potential areas of improvement in application performance
• Use of baseline and historical data to highlight and resolve performance problems
• Use actionable insights to predict and resolve future issues proactively.

Hence, an APM solution uses APM tools to resolve problems and enhance application performance.

The APM tools and features are utilized to ensure effective application performance monitoring. The performance data is collected to analyze application health and its impact on business outcomes. The developer aims to use these insights in solving performance issues and monitor the availability of software applications.

Following are the three data categories that developers consider to configure an APM platform:

• Metrics - server metrics measure the system's status by comparing it to a defined baseline. Any changes in the performance metrics highlight probable issues in the application.
• Traces - traces are used to analyze different stages in the completion of a request using data points that highlight security threats and isolate network issues
• Log Files - these hold a record of the behavior of end users on the application, using it to perform root cause analysis and study behavioral changes.

An APM solution uses these performance metrics and end-user data to support and improve the software environment. APM tools use a list of monitoring methods to carry out its function. Let’s take a deeper look into these types of monitoring.

Digital experience monitoring

It collects performance data, for instance, load time, uptime, and downtime from the user interface. It enables the collection of relevant performance metrics that support real user monitoring to analyze the end-user experience on the application.

Application monitoring

It involves the analysis of the entire application framework, including APIs, databases, web application servers, and operating systems. The server monitoring supports application performance on the web server.

It also includes stack monitoring that focuses on code-level tracing to highlight any code bottlenecks that affect the application's service performance. Hence, coupled with server and stack monitoring, the application monitoring process enhances the application’s performance at the code and server level.

Database monitoring

It analyzes the performance of SQL queries and the support from application monitoring agents.

Availability monitoring

It studies application availability and monitors hardware components within the infrastructure.

APM solutions use these monitoring and data categories to track application performance and generate alerts in case of an issue.

The APM tools then initiate data collection to offer a root cause analysis and insight into resolving the problems. The entire process relies on studying the health of the application environment and user behavior.

Within the practical applications, business-critical applications must adopt APM solutions carefully. The process must include technical strategies, organizational processes, and cultural considerations.

Some best practices in APM include:

1. Establish clear objectives

Set clear and quantifiable goals for your APM solution, including identified metrics and KPIs. Goals can focus on different aspects, for example, improving application performance, increasing system availability, and enhancing end-user experience.

2. Track important application performance metrics

You must carefully navigate through the available data to choose appropriate metrics. While different monitoring techniques, like network monitoring and container monitoring, provide deep insights into application performance, you cannot analyze all information.

The chosen metrics must align with your business outcomes. Response time, error rates, feedback from end users, and CPU usage are some of the most common metrics of interest to enterprises.

3. Set appropriate alerting thresholds

Every business requires customized alerts based on its performance thresholds. Appropriate alerting mechanisms ensure that the problems are detected early and resolved accordingly.

4. Ensure compliance and regulation

Businesses must adhere to their industry-specific regulations and compliance standards. It ensures the security of business-critical applications, including the software components and the end users.

5. Manage end-to-end monitoring

You must use all the relevant methods from the various monitoring techniques to achieve a holistic approach. From monitoring an entire stack application to analyzing user demand patterns, each aspect must be covered in your analytical approach to performance monitoring.

From a wide range of APM tools available today, you must make the right choice based on your business transactions, memory demands, and other APM solutions you are looking for. The right tool selection will enhance your performance monitoring of software applications and provide a smooth experience to your end users. Since we understand the importance of an APM tool, let’s look at some leading choices available in the market today.

Tool 1. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers a comprehensive performance monitoring solution. It supports multiple languages, architectures, and cloud-native environments. It provides various types of monitoring methods to enhance application performance.

Its key features include code-level tracing, microservice communication, and automatic root cause analysis.

Tool 2. Datadog

Optimized performance, unified monitoring, and troubleshooting allow full visibility into modern software applications.

Datadog offers essential features like distributed tracing, service maps, and customizable dashboards.

Tool 3. New Relic

New Relic provides APM tools to resolve performance issues across the entire application environment. It offers automatic instrumentation for multiple programming languages.

Its key feature includes telemetry data systems based on the cloud for metrics, events, traces, and logs.

These top vendors of APM tools provide enhanced performance monitoring of software applications. From response time, throughput, and error rates to database performance, user experience metrics, and application logs, all these aspects of your application can be monitored through an APM platform.

While performance monitoring offers multiple benefits to an enterprise and its application performance, there are different challenges associated with APM solutions. A significant challenge arises from the implementation of APM on cloud-native applications.

The distributed and dynamic nature of the microservices makes APM a challenge. They are often deployed using containerization platforms, making monitoring across multiple containers a challenging task. The dynamic nature of microservices also makes it difficult for traditional APM tools to catch up.

Cloud-native applications also require distributed tracing techniques for end-to-end performance monitoring. Correlating traces in these heterogeneous environments offers excellent challenges for APM. Hence, enterprises need to adopt particular tools and practices that can handle the complexities of a cloud-native application.

While different platforms are available for organizations to explore for their application performance monitoring, the concept often needs to be understood as observability. It is important to understand that observability and APM are different concepts or interchangeable in their implementation.

While APM only focuses on monitoring and interacting with performance issues, observability has a wider scope, enabling it to debug complex systems. APM primarily relies on structured data collection, but observability engages with a broader range of data types.

Hence, both practices focus on optimizing application behavior. The difference lies in their scope, data collection, and handling processes. While APM is focused on performance monitoring, observability takes on an exploratory and data-driven approach to troubleshooting.

Application performance monitoring is an essential tool to assess application health and offer strategies for its improvement. While the APM tools still fall short in handling the complex modern applications heterogeneity of technology stacks, they are still helpful in offering a comprehensive business impact analysis.

With the constantly evolving technological advancements, the application performance monitoring tools must also advance. The APM practices must go beyond the traditional APM solutions to adopt cloud-native monitoring solutions.

The development of APM must also integrate and leverage machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). It can enhance APM capabilities, including automated anomaly detection and improved performance monitoring.

The advancing technology also demands APM solutions to become more user-centric and increase monitoring of metrics focused on analyzing user behavior. Its impact should also include both web-based and mobile applications. An APK platform can enable APM tools to focus on mobile application monitoring.

The advancements in APM will provide comprehensive monitoring and end-to-end visibility into application performance. An advanced APM platform will enable real-time insights, improved predictive analytics, and intelligent root cause analysis.

Application performance monitoring, or APM, analyzes an application’s performance in its IT environment. Developers rely on APM tools and practices to optimize application performance. Businesses rely on improved user engagement on enterprise applications to drive their market presence.

The many features of APM, including different types of monitoring and business transactions, enable the tools to leverage user data to improve application performance. Performance monitoring relies on data and analytics to search for potential problems and resolve them proactively.

Enterprises must understand the different APM practices and explore various tools available in the market before choosing a performance monitoring solution. It involves facing other challenges posed by the limitations of APM.

While it is difficult to address these challenges, modern tools, and careful considerations can assist. For instance, using an APK platform aids in performance monitoring in mobile applications. Hence, APM practices and ideas must focus on advancing performance monitoring tools and practices.