Application performance monitoring is a tool for maintaining the efficiency and reliability of your systems. When your website experiences an unexpected slowdown, it can lead to customer attrition and operational challenges. This blog on application monitoring best practices will guide you on optimizing your monitoring setup, ensuring that your applications consistently perform at their best.
Alerty's free APM solution offers a strategic advantage for enhancing your application monitoring capabilities. Customized to align with your requirements, this tool facilitates understanding and implementing best practices in application monitoring.
Application monitoring is the process of tracking software application performance, availability, and user interactions. It involves:
Monitoring helps identify issues affecting the user experience or the application’s functionality, enabling timely troubleshooting and maintenance.
The scope of application monitoring spans from detecting critical errors, such as:
To resolve detected issues before they impact the end-user experience, application monitoring software:
A strong application monitoring tool and the insight it provides will help your teams meet SLAs and make more informed decisions for your business.
An effective monitoring strategy encompasses various monitoring tools and techniques designed to provide a comprehensive view of an application’s health across different environments, whether in development, testing, or production.
Monitoring software should also:
By monitoring applications properly, organizations can:
Application monitoring is essential for organizations to ensure that software applications :
By monitoring applications effectively and leveraging the data and insights gathered, organizations can make:
Application monitoring is a component of any software development and maintenance process, helping organizations stay competitive in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Organizations must understand the differences between on-premises and cloud-based solutions when choosing a monitoring strategy. Cloud-based monitoring is hosted on service providers' infrastructure, making it highly scalable and flexible. One of the biggest draws of cloud-based solutions is the low upfront cost. Organizations can quickly set up their monitoring without needing to invest in expensive hardware or deal with the complexities of maintenance. This makes cloud-based monitoring especially appealing to businesses of all sizes, allowing them to scale their monitoring capabilities as they grow without being burdened by physical infrastructure.
On-premises monitoring, by contrast, offers complete control over the monitoring environment. This is particularly important for organizations with strict data governance policies or must adhere to specific regulatory compliance requirements. While setting up on-premises monitoring involves a more substantial initial investment—both in purchasing hardware and ongoing maintenance—it gives businesses full authority over their monitoring tools and data.
This control translates into enhanced security and the ability to customize the monitoring setup to meet specific needs, which can be critical for industries that handle sensitive information. In short, cloud-based monitoring offers convenience and flexibility, while on-premises monitoring provides:
The choice between the two often comes down to an organization's priorities:
Application performance monitoring offers several benefits to the enterprise, including organizational effectiveness, reputation or brand, and long-term cost efficiencies.
APM initiatives must break down these traditional silos for seamless and transparent application delivery.
Reliable and available applications benefit the organization's reputation and brand. If a user can't access an application or the application responds poorly—if at all—the user will be dissatisfied because they can't do their jobs, and the company's reputation will suffer. This can result in:
Ensuring that the application works well is a wise strategy for any business that relies on its applications or software services.
It costs money to maintain and troubleshoot an application. An enterprise workload that functions poorly, experiences frequent software or infrastructure issues or poses availability challenges will incur costs that must be troubleshot and remediated.
Application monitoring helps identify problems for rapid correction. Sometimes, prompt remediation can occur before users are even aware of an issue. The cost of APM can bring direct cost savings in unneeded application downtime and troubleshooting.
Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:
It supports technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues.
Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring.
Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!
Digital experience monitoring tracks application performance from the end user’s perspective. This type of application monitoring focuses on critical metrics like:
The quicker you can identify and resolve front-end issues, the better. Digital experience monitoring typically includes:
Both approaches help identify issues affecting the user experience, ensuring prompt resolution.
Application monitoring provides visibility into the performance of the entire application stack, including:
It also includes IT infrastructure monitoring, focusing on factors like CPU utilization, disk space, and network performance. Application monitoring often features code-level tracing, which helps identify specific portions of code that may be causing performance bottlenecks, thereby facilitating more targeted troubleshooting.
Database monitoring explicitly targets the performance of SQL queries or procedures. While application monitoring agents provide an overview of dataset performance, database monitoring goes deeper into analyzing the efficiency of database operations.
This helps ensure databases run optimally, reducing query response times and preventing potential issues impacting overall application performance.
Availability monitoring ensures that application and hardware components are accessible to users. This type of monitoring checks whether applications are available and operational, as they can generate performance data even when inaccessible to end users. Monitoring availability is crucial for maintaining the following:
Performance monitoring measures key metrics like response time and real-time application data to assess performance. This type of monitoring helps identify issues such as:
By proactively monitoring performance, organizations can maintain high application efficiency and user satisfaction levels.
Resource monitoring focuses on tracking the usage of critical resources, such as:
It takes a more granular approach than general application monitoring, ensuring that applications have the necessary resources to operate efficiently. Resource monitoring is essential for cloud cost optimization, helping organizations maximize their resources while controlling expenses.
Security monitoring detects vulnerabilities and threats like:
Organizations can continuously:
This type of monitoring is integral to maintaining an application or system's overall security posture.
Dependency monitoring tracks the performance and health of external services and components that an application depends on, such as:
Since any issues with these dependencies can directly impact the application’s functionality, monitoring them is crucial. It allows teams to take corrective actions, such as:
Traffic monitoring analyzes the volume and nature of user requests to identify trends, peak usage periods, and potential security threats. By understanding traffic patterns, organizations can optimize their infrastructure to handle increased loads, ensuring the application remains responsive during high-demand periods.
Traffic monitoring also plays a key role in detecting and mitigating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, protecting the application’s availability. Insights from traffic analysis guide strategic decisions, such as capacity planning and geographic expansion, by highlighting:
RUM offers real-time insights into user application experiences. It captures:
Trends become apparent quickly. This enables pinpointing issues like slow pages or confusing navigation for swift resolution. RUM data supports continuous application improvement. It helps:
Response time is when a web app responds to a user interaction or request. This includes the time it takes to:
There are various ways to measure the response time:
Throughput refers to a web app's capability to process the number of transactions or requests within a specific time frame. It helps understand the application’s capacity to handle high workloads. Throughput helps monitor the performance and scalability of an app:
Throughput is affected by various factors, such as:
Errors in an app can significantly dent the user experience, making users leave the app. Thus, tracking errors and fixing them on time is crucial. This is what the Error rates metric is for. Error rates indicate the percentage of requests (made to an app) that fail or return errors. High error rates mean an app is more likely to crash or malfunction, which can severely impact user experience.
Here are three common ways to track application errors:
We can determine how long the web app is properly functional by monitoring uptime and availability. These are excellent performance metrics. Ways to monitor these metrics include:
Resource utilization metrics help ensure that the web application uses server resources efficiently. This helps prevent bottlenecks, enhancing the app’s performance. Common resource utilization metrics include:
User satisfaction metrics help us understand the end-user experience and overall satisfaction with the application. These metrics include:
Setting clear performance goals for your application monitoring is crucial. These goals should be measurable against:
Having defined goals allows you to develop a plan to achieve them. Regular monitoring and analysis of performance data help gauge progress.
Manual monitoring is often insufficient in today's complex environments. Utilizing automation through APM tools can provide a competitive edge. Look for tools that can:
It's essential to test the APM tool you choose within your environment. Avoid building your monitoring tool and opt for market-tested products. Regularly test and adjust your automation processes to ensure accurate responses as circumstances shift.
Ensure you track the most critical data when monitoring your application. Key metrics to monitor include:
Prioritize monitoring Apdex, a metric that reflects user satisfaction with your services.
Calibrate your monitoring systems to alert teams about critical events while reducing false alarms. Meaningful alerts should be actionable and associated with significant performance thresholds or anomalies requiring attention. Aligning alerts with business-critical metrics ensures teams focus on issues impacting application performance and user satisfaction.
Real User Monitoring (RUM) offers real-time insights into user application interactions. It provides valuable data on user experiences across various devices and networks, helping:
Implementing RUM allows organizations to make data-driven decisions about UX improvements and performance optimizations.
Effective log management and analysis involve:
This comprehensive log data offers detailed insights into:
Automated log analysis tools can detect patterns and anomalies indicative of operational or security issues for proactive resolution.
Comprehensive application monitoring spans:
Monitoring across these dimensions provides a holistic view of the application, enabling a more effective response to issues and trends. Integrating different monitoring tools and approaches ensures coverage across all critical application functionality and performance aspects.
Consolidating monitoring tools helps eliminate complexities and streamline the monitoring process. While different teams may use various tools based on their specific needs, interoperability becomes essential. An effective APM solution should offer capabilities to replace a subset of tools and seamlessly integrate with others to consolidate insights and enhance efficiency.
Monitoring your app's performance should prioritize the end user's experience. Tracking the ApDex score, which quantifies customer satisfaction when using an app, is essential. A higher ApDex score indicates higher user satisfaction levels regarding app performance and speed.
Ensuring the security of software applications and compliance with relevant requirements is a top priority in monitoring strategies. Consider business requirements and tools like encryption and access controls to meet compliance standards.
Monitoring software should focus on security to identify anomalies and potential security incidents by tracking:
The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) lists the 25 most dangerous software weaknesses, helping developers identify which vulnerabilities to focus on.
Store historical performance data for trend analysis and long-term planning. Historical data helps identify recurring issues and informs decisions about infrastructure and application improvements.
Regularly review and update your monitoring strategy to adapt to changes in:
Solicit feedback from users and stakeholders to enhance monitoring based on real-world experiences.
Conduct regular synthetic tests to simulate user interactions and test application functionality. Synthetic monitoring helps identify performance bottlenecks and potential issues before they affect real users.
Foster collaboration between development, operations, and business teams. Establish clear communication channels to:
Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:
It supports technologies like:
Alerty monitors databases such as:
It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:
Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty’s free APM solution today!
Veracode aims to prevent security breaches by regularly scanning numerous aspects of your web applications to locate any potential vulnerabilities. This includes:
Netreo’s web application response time monitor (ART) intends to allow your team to attain a realistic view of user experience and highlight the source of performance slowdowns.
Netreo’s solution utilizes automation to offer instant visual confirmation of new network devices from any size enterprise, with minimal configuration and maintenance.
Site24x7 is the following tool to be added to the list of leading web application monitoring tools. Site24x7 is an AI-powered all-in-one monitoring solution with numerous tools like:
The tool offers various capabilities, but for web applications, you can monitor Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, and mobile platforms to highlight application servers and app components generating errors. You can also measure specific user actions and highlight potential bottlenecks affecting end-user experience.
Raygun offers application monitoring for web and mobile apps, which gives you visibility into how your users experience your software applications. The tool aims to help reduce errors impacting the checkout process by as much as 90% across multiple stores.
This web application tool allows for data-driven monitoring and management of back-end issues. It captures the complete lifecycle of incoming web requests to help:
AppDynamics aims to go beyond traditional web application tools by enabling software-defined businesses with smart, robust tools to examine and enhance business performance in production.
The tool intends to give users total visibility into their application architecture and reduce mean-time-to-resolution by almost 90%.
IBM Instana is an APM tool with web application monitoring capabilities. The tool offers automatic discovery of all the components of your web application and presents a graphical representation of the application’s topology.
It also tracks application performance in real time with a granularity of 1 second and alerts IT teams within less than 3 seconds upon detecting any issues in application performance.
Prometheus enables you to capture time-series data as metrics. These metrics can be aggregated to give insights into our systems' behavior. It was initially developed at SoundCloud in 2012 before being released as an open-source project. After Kubernetes, it was the second project to graduate from CNCF.
Prometheus does not do distributed tracing but can be used effectively to monitor time-series data as metrics. It also has some limitations at scale as it is designed for a single machine. The visualization layer of Prometheus is essential, but it is generally used with Grafana, a visualization tool to create:
AppOptics is a SaaS-based APM and infrastructure tool for hybrid and cloud-native IT environments. It enables organizations to visualize and troubleshoot application bottlenecks.
The platform includes more than 150 out-of-the-box plugins and integrations for monitoring servers, virtual hosts, and containers, with support for features such as:
Stackify Retrace is an application performance management and observability platform offered as SaaS. The platform aggregates performance, log, error, and metric data to provide consolidated monitoring and insights into production and preproduction environments.
Retrace includes enhanced search and drill-down capabilities into server and application logs and the ability to create customized log queries.
Ease of deployment and management is a crucial factor when choosing application monitoring tools. A tool that is difficult to set up or requires extensive manual configuration can consume valuable time and resources. Look for tools that offer straightforward integration with your existing infrastructure and applications with minimal disruption to your operations.
Automation features, such as auto-discovery of services and resources, can significantly reduce the effort required to maintain monitoring coverage as your environment evolves. Consider the tool's user interface and reporting capabilities. A user-friendly dashboard that provides clear, actionable insights can enhance the effectiveness of your monitoring strategy.
Security, data protection, and privacy are critical considerations when choosing application monitoring tools, especially for applications that handle sensitive data. Ensure the tool complies with industry standards and regulations relevant to your business, such as:
Look for features that secure data in transit and at rest, such as encryption, and evaluate the vendor’s policies and practices for data handling and privacy. The ability to control data retention, access controls, and audit logs can also help meet your security and compliance requirements.
Automation is key in application performance monitoring. A tool that leverages automation through features that can dramatically reduce the manual workload that would otherwise fall on your IT and DevOps teams. These include:
Scalability is essential to consider when choosing your application performance monitoring solution. Instead of upgrading your APM tools as your business grows, you'll want a solution that can scale seamlessly with your business.
Seek out a tool, including mobile and desktop, that can:
Look for a tool that automatically detects changes, issues, and incidents and provides the information in context. This helps drastically reduce the time required to investigate and address the root cause of issues impacting your applications.
A solution with threshold-based features will result in the fastest mean time to resolution (MTTR). These include:
Having a tool that integrates well with other tools in your IT environment can significantly optimize your workflows. An application monitoring tool that integrates seamlessly with various management tools can enhance the efficiency of your workflows without requiring additional plugins or application restarts.
Alerty integrates with tools like Sentry's error-tracking capabilities to provide a comprehensive view of application performance across the entire IT infrastructure without plug-ins or application restarts.
Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups. It offers a range of monitoring capabilities to help organizations monitor their applications and databases.
Alerty's application performance monitoring (APM) functionality is designed to help developers identify and fix issues before they impact users. It supports a variety of technologies, including:
Alerty's APM solution makes it easier for developers to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and optimize their applications for an improved user experience.
In addition to APM, Alerty also provides database monitoring capabilities for popular databases like:
Alerty enables organizations to quickly detect and resolve database performance issues by tracking key metrics such as CPU usage and memory consumption, ensuring optimal application performance and user experience.
Alerty also offers robust incident management functionality to help organizations respond quickly to issues as they arise. Alerty ensures that teams can promptly address problems by providing quick incident management capabilities, minimizing user impact and maintaining service availability.
To further optimize user experience, Alerty includes Real User Monitoring (RUM) capabilities that allow organizations to track user interactions with their applications in real time. Organizations can gain valuable insights to enhance user experience and drive user satisfaction by understanding how users engage with their applications.
Alerty's Universal Service Monitoring functionality extends monitoring capabilities beyond applications and databases to cover essential dependencies like:
By monitoring these external services, organizations can ensure that their applications remain reliable and performant, even when relying on third-party services.
Alerty leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify setup and configuration, making it easy for organizations to get up and running quickly. The cost-effective nature of Alerty's monitoring solution makes it an attractive option for developers and small teams looking for efficient, affordable monitoring capabilities.
Alerty integrates seamlessly with tools like Sentry, enhancing its capabilities and extending its functionality to fit with existing workflows. By integrating with other tools, Alerty becomes a valuable asset for developers and teams looking to streamline their monitoring processes and gain actionable insights into application performance.