What is Application Performance Monitoring?

What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application performance management is the real-time monitoring and management of performance and user experience of software applications.

Speed is everything in today’s connected world. Especially when it comes to the applications and websites accessed by end users, it’s much more crucial. Users are not tolerant to slowness. They tend to abandon the application and move on to a similar app if it’s possible. So it will have a huge negative impact on business productivity, profits and even the brand itself.

To be successful, velocity and stability should be in balance. IT disaster reports states that stability varies significantly between top-performing and lower-performing organizations, and it is only getting worse. Whether it’s a mobile app, a custom web app or an enterprise app such as SAP or SharePoint, complexity of infrastructures are increasing everyday due to technical depth. Ensuring the high quality is not easy to achieve.

Mobile app development platforms, cloud-native infrastructures, virtualized and containerized servers, etc. make performance management a challenge. That’s why dealing with performance problems when they first appear will make you suffer on production. You need to continuously monitor your apps and take necessary actions.

When you monitor the transactions on production system on high level, you only see response times, transaction counts etc. That can pinpoint the painful area of your application but in order to understand the root cause deeply, you need to do more.

One solution might be dynamic analysis of an application. That’s called code level profiling. It measures the memory, time complexity and the use of particular instructions, or the frequency and duration of function calls. Second one might be performing user experience monitoring and see what kind of errors are produced during daily usage. All those things can be achieved easily with Application Performance Monitoring(APM) tools.

There is a wide range of application APM tools on the market. Some of them are paid solutions and some of them are open source/free tools.

What can an APM tool bring into your life?

• Performance(response and loading time) of individual web requests or transactions
• Usage and performance of underlying application dependencies (databases, web services, caching, etc)
• Detailed transaction traces to specific source code
• Code profiling
• Basic server metrics like CPU, memory, Disc read/write etc
• Application framework metrics like performance counters, JMX mBeans, etc
• Application related errors
• Real user traffic monitoring

In order to have a successful DevOps environment, testing is crucial. Testing starts with monitoring the right metrics. That’s why having an APM tool in your tech stack would be beneficial for your company’s success.

As Loadium, we support New Relic and AppDynamics as application performance monitoring tools. You just add your credentials to correlate your performance test results with your tool to get the most out of your tests.

Check out Loadium blog to see more great content about performance testing!