APM, also known as application performance management, is an essential process that involves closely managing, monitoring, and improving the performance and availability of software applications to achieve desired service outcomes. This requires consistent measurement of application performance as well as effectively resolving potential problems to ensure optimal operations that meet the needs of end users.
APM also means application performance monitoring as a part of application performance management. Monitoring keeps a close watch on the application's performance to catch problems early. The management in APM, however, takes the full picture. It looks at everything from the front-end user's experience to the back end operations, aiming for the best business results. Simply put, monitoring is just one part of managing how an application performs.
Why is APM necessary?
We've established what APM is. Now, let's explore the compelling reasons why it's essential for optimizing application performance. As technology progresses and customer demands increase, businesses are turning to various software solutions to improve application performance and outpace competitors. Many companies have begun adopting microservices and cloud-native architectures instead of monolithic ones to achieve desired business outcomes and meet customer expectations more quickly.
Software architects now build and deploy application components as a collection of microservices and utilize distributed infrastructure components like containers, virtual machines, serverless, or cloud applications to scale independently as business needs evolve. Even a brief disruption in any technology component can significantly impact daily operations, leading to dissatisfied customers, substantial revenue losses, and harm to the company's overall brand reputation.
Ensuring top-notch performance for your application as a whole can prove to be a daunting task. However, gaining in-depth insights into the specific elements of your distributed applications and infrastructure is crucial to guarantee optimal performance in real time. Attaining comprehensive, real-time observability across all facets of your application infrastructure, spanning the front end to the back end, is imperative for delivering exceptional business operations. It also enables you to detect and resolve performance glitches before they affect end users, thereby ensuring a seamless digital experience for your customers 24/7.
APM vs. observability: What's the difference?
At first glance, APM and observability might seem similar as they both involve gathering data from multiple sources and delivering insights on performance. However, APM focuses primarily on application debugging while observability provides a broader understanding of the entire system. Additionally, observability relies on a comprehensive understanding of the technical elements contributing to application performance. By analyzing and correlating logs, metrics, and traces, observability identifies the underlying cause of performance issues and aids in troubleshooting complex problems within dynamic system environments.
What are the core components of APM?
To ensure optimal performance of your application, it is crucial to have complete visibility into your application stack. The following are key components that are involved in APM:
Business application monitoring
Assessing the effectiveness of your application is vital for improving its performance and enhancing business processes. Following the development stage and implementation, ongoing performance monitoring is necessary to rapidly detect and address any problems that might occur. Real-time information about the application's internal workings can considerably influence the accuracy of business results.
Monitoring individual transactions, database calls, thread profiles, and error reports can help discover and fix any slowdowns in application performance. Examining the relationships between various application components with the help of automated service maps can also greatly simplify problem-solving and issue resolution before they affect business operations.
Infrastructure monitoring
Numerous companies implement a diverse business infrastructure to complement their applications, encompassing a wide range of components such as servers, databases, networks, and application servers. As cloud platforms and other advanced technologies become increasingly prevalent, monitoring infrastructure has evolved to encompass virtualized environments, cloud infrastructure, microservices, containers, and beyond.
By understanding the underlying infrastructure elements, businesses can ensure their applications meet performance standards and receive early alerts for potential problems, allowing for efficient performance enhancement, capacity planning, and cost management.
End-user experience monitoring
Ensuring a positive end-user experience is crucial for the success of any business application. While it's important to have a thorough understanding of the back-end functionality, it's equally essential to pay attention to the front end to ensure a seamless user experience. Overlooking the front end can result in dissatisfied users, leading to a decline in customer satisfaction and retention.
By gaining a comprehensive understanding of your application's front-end performance, you can gain valuable insights into how digital services operate and how users engage with them in real-time. This can ultimately result in increased user loyalty, cost reductions, improved customer retention, and higher revenues. Consistently monitoring the real user experience of your web application and obtaining real-time insights into its front-end performance enables you to examine how users from different locations interact with your application. You should also run synthetic tests of the critical user paths on your website 24x7 and monitor API endpoints to get a broader perspective of end-user experience.
Automatic discovery and mapping of dependencies
In a fast-paced business environment, the ability to effectively manage multiple infrastructure components is crucial to devise an effective application performance management strategy. This requires a deep understanding of the individual components and their interdependencies within the application infrastructure. In particular, when it comes to incident resolution, having a comprehensive view of these interconnections by obtaining a better understanding of the relationships between different resources and how they impact overall application performance is essential and can enable you to proactively identify and resolve potential issues before they escalate, minimizing downtime, and ensuring a smooth user experience.
Gaining a holistic overview of how various resources and infrastructure components are interconnected within an application enables you to maintain awareness and to identify affected resources in case of performance outages quickly. It involves continuously discovering applications running on different servers, mapping their interconnections in the form of network maps, and updating the maps with newly-discovered resources. This ensures that the maps are always up-to-date and reflect the current state of the application infrastructure in real time.
Real-time alerting and incident resolution
Real-time alerts are a crucial aspect of APM, as they enable prompt identification of performance issues during application downtime or slowdown. These alerts allow for immediate tracking of performance bottlenecks. They should also be accessible through various channels, including email, SMS, Slack messages, and ITSM tool integrations like ServiceNow and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. Additionally, the alerts should be able to trigger preconfigured automated actions, such as running scripts or batch files, restarting virtual machines or container instances, executing MBean operations, generating heap dumps, thread dumps, and garbage collections, or webhooks. These automated actions can greatly facilitate faster troubleshooting and resolution of any issues that may arise.
Application analytics and reporting
Gaining comprehensive performance analytics of your application infrastructure is important to effectively monitor and evaluate the performance of your applications over time. While monitoring your application stack can be beneficial for performance tracking, delving into the specifics of how each application component is functioning can provide a comprehensive understanding of your application infrastructure's performance, particularly in hybrid or microservices architectures. This can aid in identifying potential areas for enhancement, predicting application performance, and detecting intricate issues in a timely manner.
Get started with APM using ManageEngine Applications Manager
In today's extremely competitive business world, ensuring optimal application performance is crucial for success. ManageEngine Applications Manager provides organizations with an effective APM tool that provides in-depth insights into the critical components of your application for enhanced performance. With real-time monitoring, end-to-end visibility, and performance analytics, Applications Manager enables businesses to deliver a seamless user experience, increase efficiency, and reduce downtime, enabling them to unlock the full potential of their applications and stay ahead of the competition.
Try Applications Manager today by downloading a 30-day, free trial to begin monitoring your application performance alongside your infrastructure components.
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