What is Application Performance  Management (APM)?

Your business can live or die based on the performance of the applications through which your customers access it. For a large company, downtime can mean thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Problems arising that make your application unusable could push away new customers who must instead move towards solutions who have stayed on top of their problems.

In this digital world, most businesses highly depend on software to monitor and support various elements. Thus, ensuring all organisations' critical applications are running well should be given priority. There are different application performance management and monitoring (APM) tools available in the market for IT and developers' operations.

What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?

Application performance monitoring (APM) is the practice of managing the overall performance of a company's software applications to monitor transaction times, availability, and potential performance issues that are likely to impact the user experience.

Most business applications, websites, and mobile applications currently use cases to monitor performance. With the technological boom ruling today's digital world, cases may not stand the test of time. They are slowly being outdated by the most potent and versatile monitoring tools that use specific metrics to monitor telemetry data.

Why Does Your Business Require APM Tools?

Most applications used in businesses seem simple until they crash. When internal business applications are at fault, they become significantly slow, frustrate users and will make a company suffer substantial revenue losses. The business is also likely to realise reduced employees' productivity.

Adopting an integrated APM solution in your business provides a comprehensive view of the root causes of potential risks and performance metrics of your critical applications. The key features of the APM tools offer real-time performance issue alerts and can at times generate data-related reports that can help the IT team improve, update or repair application software.

Key Monitoring Features of APM Tools

Real User Monitoring

Real user monitoring allows users to monitor the overall performance of all web applications from their own perspective. This feature gives users a deeper insight into page load times, regional variability, errors during interactions and response times. End-user monitoring ensures quality services at all times because it rapidly detects performance issues and significantly reduces mean time to recovery.

Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic monitoring is one of the most active approaches that ensures availability and optimal performance by detecting or predicting application performance issues. It establishes a metric baseline for optimal performance, monitors transaction performance and benchmarks the competition by tracing synthetic transactions.

Infrastructure Monitoring

This feature provides all required data to evaluate issues with the database, network, or web server before they negatively affect potential customers.

IoT Monitoring

Most users access business applications using mobile devices, which are prone to technological failures. They call for the addition of a troubleshooting layer. IoT monitoring gives the IT team a unified view of all connected applications and helps manage C/C++ apps and JavaScript. They also report performance diagnostics that help the IT team address performance problems.

Server Monitoring

Server monitoring entails the entire process of collecting metrics related to infrastructures, such as CPU utilisation and memory usage, to assess app and web server performance. Server monitors facilitate the troubleshooting process by displaying code-level details and other vital data that helps the IT team track server trends and metrics over time.

Database Monitoring

This feature identifies all database-related issues and tracks performance metrics such as top users, programs, and objects. It also reviews the execution plans for slow Structured Query Language and gives valuable information that allows IT experts to isolate bottlenecks.

Benefits of APM to a Business

By giving businesses and other organisations increased intelligence and visibility of all websites, applications, and dependencies, APM tools are known to provide technical support and practical benefits to organisations. Some advantages to the business include:

• Improved user experience
• Effective and increased communication rates
• Profit maximisation
• Increased employee productivity
• Saving significant time on troubleshooting
• Improve operational and developer productivity
• Increased conversion rates

At 2 Steps, we help companies navigate their tech stack with best-in-class testing capabilities. Are you ready to stop strangling efficiency with poor testing capabilities? Book a 15 min demo with us today to learn how to optimise your application end-user monitoring.