Definition
Application performance monitoring (APM) is a continuous process of tracking, measuring, and managing an application’s performance.
It uses various tools to collect and analyze system data, identifying bottlenecks and providing insights into various aspects of system performance.
APM’s main aim is to ensure the system delivers an optimal user experience, eradicate downtimes, and maintain high-quality services.
Application Performance Monitoring Tools
- Manual performance testing: Regular manual testing can help to detect many issues, but it can be time-consuming and doesn’t provide continuous, real-time monitoring.
- Network monitoring tools: These tools are designed to monitor the network performance metrics like bandwidth usage and latency. However, they don’t analyze the app’s performance specifically.
- Infrastructure monitoring tools: These tools track the performance of servers, networks, and other underlying infrastructure on which an application relies. However, they cannot provide insights into the user experience.
- Error tracking tools: Track and report all application-related errors and help troubleshoot issues. However, they lack broader performance analysis features.
- Log analysis tools: Log analysis tools identify system performance issues by collecting and analyzing the system’s log files. They have inadequate real-time performance analysis capability.
Application Performance Monitoring Uses
- Service level agreements (SLAs): IT service providers have a contractual obligation to avail the services purchased by the client without fail. APMs monitor the performance of those services to determine whether they meet expectations as per the agreement.
- Analytics: APMs provide an organization with data for analytics that can help fix performance issues and errors.
- Infrastructure monitoring: APMs can collect performance data about virtual machines, databases, containers, and servers.
- Component monitoring: This type tracks the entire IT infrastructure and analyses its overall performance. It monitors all key resources, including network components, CPU utilization, servers, and memory usage.
- User-defined transaction profiling: This method uses APMs to recreate real user interactions with the system and learn the circumstances that lead to errors or performance issues.
- Real user monitoring: It compares the end-user experience with the preset baseline. For instance, if the number of users with login issues exceeds a certain threshold, the system sends an alert to the administrator.