Application Performance Monitoring: Boost Your Modern Applications with APM Tools

In today’s enterprise landscape, virtually every business relies on software. The fact that up to 80% of IT budgets are spent on application management (Science Direct data) is evidence of how important this aspect is. At a time when organizations are betting on hybrid solutions, monitoring cloud and on-premises environments, application monitoring is a challenge. System architects and DevOps teams need tools that allow them to work proactively before application outages occur and there is a need to fix massive defects. In the article, we will guide you through the key performance metrics and capabilities of app performance monitoring tools.

Why monitor application performance?  

The cost of application downtime can run into millions. According to an IBM study, the average cost of unplanned system downtime equals $400,000 per hour.

Annually, downtime costs can reach $2.5 trillion, reports IDC. Spectacular outages don’t happen every day. However, there are elements in the functioning of an application, seemingly harmless ones, which undermine its capabilities day after day. Slow performance and memory or resource usage issues are more difficult to evade than major failures. This is why monitoring platforms have gained popularity.

In addition, today, most applications require real- or near-real-time monitoring due to operating on real-time data. Organizations need ongoing insight into enterprise systems for them to bring business value.

What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and why do you need it?  

Application performance monitoring is an element of application performance management. By monitoring software applications, any failures can be better predicted and prevented, thereby minimizing the impact on users. All the magic happens thanks to APM tools’ telemetry agents that analyze data, detect anomalies, send alerts to administrators, or even solve many problems automatically. 

Application performance monitoring tools enable development teams not only to find out why apps run slowly, but importantly, to solve application performance issues faster before they become major incidents affecting your critical applications.  
 
There are several types of application performance monitoring:  

• User experience monitoring – collecting performance data such as loading speed, responsiveness, and availability from the user interface on the user’s device. 
• Application monitoring – tracking the application framework, OS, data storage, application programming interfaces, middleware layer, hosting server for web applications, user interface, and overall performance of IT infrastructure such as processing power and network capabilities. 
• Database monitoring – with database monitoring tools, you can optimize the performance of your database, detecting cost-intensive or ineffective SQL queries. 
• Availability monitoring – monitoring the availability of systems and hardware components.  

Understanding the Basics of APM Tools 

Understanding the basics of APM tools is crucial for maximizing the effective application performance of your organization. Monitoring involves tracking and collecting data on various aspects of your application infrastructure, such as application discovery and runtime application architecture. This data is then analyzed by means of application performance monitoring and web performance monitoring solutions to ensure application availability and uptime.  

• Tracking and collecting data – code snippets/application agents of APM tools allow you to collect performance data metrics. 
• Monitoring – the collected data is constantly monitored to check if the app’s performance meets the parameters. This includes monitoring error rates, response times, server performance, the network, and storage capabilities.  
• Analysis – monitoring tools subject the collected information to analysis using visualization and reporting capabilities to check the potential impact of anomalies on business.  
• Alerting – If performance parameters are not met, the APM tool alerts administrators via selected channels (e.g., SMS, e-mail, or an incident management tool). 
• Troubleshooting and optimizing – by identifying trends and repetitive patterns or deviations, automated alerts are sent or remedial steps are implemented. The information collected about the application’s performance allows teams to identify the cause and quickly repair or optimize the system’s performance.  

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Key APM Metrics to Monitor for Application Performance  

• Response Time – refers to how quickly an application reacts to a user’s action. It includes two parts: server response time, which is how long it takes for the server to handle the request, and network latency, which is the time it takes for the request to travel through the network. 
• Error rates – checking how often errors occur in the application. This also allows you to ascertain the impact on users and get to the source of the error.  
• Application availability – monitoring downtimes to see how long the application is operational and available to users.  
• Central Processing Unit (CPU) – monitoring data on the operation of the server or virtual machines helps identify performance problems.  
• RAM – monitoring memory helps identify shortages that affect application performance and stability.  
• Network usage – how much bandwidth an application is using. If it’s using a lot, it might mean there are problems that could be slowing down the response time of the application. 
• Garbage collection – monitoring garbage collection is important for DevOps teams. It allows developers to check which of the previously created items are no longer in use, remove unused code, and thus avoid an OutOfMemory Error. 
• Throughput – how much information an application can send or receive in a certain amount of time. It helps us see if an application can manage the amount of traffic it’s supposed to handle. 
• Database queries – how many times an application asks the database for information. APM tools use this info to find queries that are slow or not working well, which could be slowing down the whole system. 
• Usage count – in the application development process, new features are often introduced. This metric allows us to see which functionalities are used and how often, and thus how useful they are. With this knowledge, development teams can focus on developing critical areas.  
• Apdex – Application Performance Index is a standard for measuring user satisfaction based on response times. With defined response times to user requests, we can understand how application performance affects user experience and plan improvements. Apdex works best combined with other, broader tools that allow for the comprehensive analysis of collected data. 

5 Application Performance Monitoring best practices 

By following the 5 application performance monitoring best practices listed below, you can achieve better visibility in terms of your overall application performance and make informed decisions to enhance the user experience. 

1. Defining performance objectives – setting KPIs that will allow you to measure application performance and find benchmarks.  
2. Defining monitoring objectives – you need to know the answers to questions such as: What is the reason behind implementing APM solutions? What is the goal of application performance monitoring? Is your goal to perform faster, improve response time, or increase server capabilities? Take the time to define precise objectives. 
3. Identifying specific scenarios – some specific scenarios for monitoring include: 

• tracking the response times of critical user transactions to ensure they are meeting expected performance levels,  
• monitoring CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization,  
• application dependency monitoring,  
• error and exception monitoring,  
• load testing and scalability, 
• real user monitoring. 

4. Fostering collaborative culture – one way to foster a collaborative culture and proactively address performance issues is to implement proper alerting and notification systems within your organization. This way, employees can quickly and easily communicate and collaborate on addressing any performance issues.  
5. Optimizing and constantly growing – staying up to date with the latest best practices and technologies in application performance monitoring can help you constantly improve the performance of your application.  

Realizing the Benefits of APM in Modern Applications 

• Boosting App Performance and Availability – APM tools offer real-time analysis to detect and fix issues before they impact users, reducing downtime and enhancing the user experience. They provide a comprehensive view of the entire application stack, allowing teams to address performance bottlenecks at any layer. By monitoring performance and alerting teams to potential issues, APM ensures application availability, minimizing downtime and enhancing customer satisfaction. 
• Increased development team productivity – since problems are diagnosed and resolved in real time, developers and DevOps teams can focus more on developing and implementing the most useful application components. The use of APM tools therefore means greater productivity for development teams.  
• Cost savings – monitoring helps not only reduce downtime and repair work but also optimize the usage of resources.  
• Faster bug fixes – by knowing what the key cause of the issue is, teams fix bugs faster and save time on finding possible reasons for defects.  
• Better time to recovery – in the case of major failures, this metric is vitally important. With APM tools, teams are proactive and minimize the possibility of incidents occurring rather than reacting to problems.  
• SLA compliance – APM tools provide great capabilities in terms of generating compliance reports and thereby meeting SLAs.  

Components and Features of APM Tools 

Exploring Components of APM Solutions 

There are many performance monitoring tools available on the market. In this article, we want to point out what components to look for, rather than analyzing the available solutions. You need to consider application health monitoring capabilities, alerts, data analytics, integrations, scalability potential, and ease/intuitiveness of use. Below we outline each of these important areas.  

Essential Features to Look for in Application Performance Monitoring Tools 

1. Monitoring capabilities – look for 4 telemetry data types called MELT (metrics, events, logs, and traces). 

• Metrics: data measuring performance (CPU, memory usage).  
• Events: particular occurrences providing you with information regarding the state of the application.   
• Logs: records giving you insights into the system’s operation. 
• Traces: records on requests allowing you to comprehend their flow and performance-critical aspects.  

2. Alerts and incident management – not all problems require immediate action. It is worth betting on a tool that allows for efficient and automated incident management, prioritization, and swift redirection of tickets to the appropriate teams.  

3. Analytics – the data-driven approach also applies to tools for measuring application performance. Make sure that the solution will allow you to track metrics such as Mean Time to Identify (MTTI – the total time required to identify an issue), and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR – the total time taken to fix a problem).  

4. Scalability – be sure to get proactive management scalability capabilities. With these, you can identify idle or over-provisioned resources, or predict needs based on trends. This improves your budgeting plans. 

While Application Performance Monitoring (APM) offers valuable insights, sometimes just tracking data and analytics isn’t enough to ensure a great user experience.  To really improve performance, management systems may need to blend monitoring data with automation and orchestration. This combination can help fix issues more quickly and even prevent them from happening in the first place. 

Summary: effective application monitoring  

Effective application monitoring is crucial for ensuring smooth performance. By utilizing real-time monitoring, organizations can gain instant insight and quickly address any issues. The APM tools available on the market provide comprehensive solutions for monitoring the performance of enterprise systems.  

Monitoring the root cause of application issues and tracking web performance is essential for maintaining the application’s availability and uptime. By monitoring application servers, organizations can proactively address any potential issues before they impact the end-user experience. Overall, modern application performance monitoring tools provide valuable insights into application performance across a variety of metrics. 

On the other hand, while Application Performance Monitoring (APM) offers significant benefits, the emergence of cloud-native applications presents new challenges. Cloud-native apps, with their dynamic microservices architecture, produce vast amounts of telemetry data. Each microservice generates its own data, leading to difficulty in identifying crucial events within the application infrastructure. 

The speed at which data is generated poses a challenge, especially with numerous microservices contributing data rapidly.  

These challenges underscore the need for innovative approaches to APM in cloud-native environments, as traditional methods may struggle to keep pace with the unique demands of these applications.