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Application Monitoring Strategy Requirements for Implementing APM

Application performance monitoring is like having a guardian angel for your applications. Imagine never missing a beat, always knowing when performance issues arise, and proactively addressing them before they affect your users. In this article, we will help you through the complexities of application monitoring, share best practices, and craft you craft a solid strategy to ensure your applications always perform at their peak.

Alerty's free APM solution can help you master application monitoring strategies. Whether you're a seasoned IT professional or just starting out, Alerty provides the insights and tools needed to monitor applications effectively and ensure their optimal performance.

Table of Contents

What Is Application Performance Monitoring

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a specialized form of monitoring that focuses on application performance and behavior.

Key Features of Application Performance Monitoring

  • Transaction tracing
  • Code-level profiling
  • User experience monitoring

With this detailed visibility, developers, and operations teams can more effectively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks. APM is particularly valuable for complex, distributed applications where traditional monitoring may not provide sufficient insights into intricate interactions.

User Transaction Tracing With APM Tools

Consider an e-commerce platform that experiences intermittent slowdowns during peak hours. APM tools can trace individual user transactions and pinpoint the application components or databases contributing to performance degradation. 

This level of granularity allows DevOps teams to quickly identify and resolve issues, such as inefficient database queries or resource contention, ensuring a smooth user experience.

Comprehensive Performance Monitoring Capabilities

  • Websites
  • Mobile apps
  • Servers
  • Networks
  • APIs
  • Cloud-based services

How Is APM Used in Modern Applications?

APM is often used with modern applications to assess the user experience. This might mean tracking an application's load along with KPIs. Doing so enables an organization to monitor the user experience and provides visibility into how that experience changes as an application's workload increases.

Proactive Performance Management in Development

Some DevOps teams incorporate APM into the application development process to avoid putting a change into production if it's found to affect performance adversely. APM helps proactively identify performance issues early in the development cycle, saving valuable time and resources in the long run.

Data-Driven Decisions for Optimal User Experience

By leveraging APM tools, organizations can gain valuable insights into application performance, user experience, and overall system health. This knowledge enables them to make informed decisions, optimize performance, and deliver exceptional user experiences effectively.

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How Does Application Performance Monitoring Work

Application performance monitoring tools or platforms work by observing how apps perform and whether they behave appropriately. If the apps aren't behaving appropriately, data is collected on the source of the issue. The gathered data is analyzed in the context of its effect on the business, and the application environment is corrected to resolve any similar problems before they occur.

When configuring an APM platform, three categories of data should be considered:

Metrics

A metric is a quantified measure that can be used to understand the status of a specific process. Metrics are often compared to a defined baseline to analyze the system or process's status. Changing metrics is a common indication of an underlying issue.

Traces

A trace is the complete processing of a request. It illustrates and understands the request's complete journey as it travels through all the network's components and services. 

Benefits of Trace Data in Monitoring

  • Indicate errors
  • Diagnose security threats
  • Detect network issues
  • Isolate network problems

Log files

Log files are automatically created by an application or OS and hold information about user behavior and app events. 

Uses of Trace Data Analysis

  • Perform root cause analysis
  • Understand metric changes
  • Identify event origins

Because performance monitoring is part of the broader performance management topic, it's important to note that more than monitored data and analytics might be needed to ensure adequate user experience. 

Performance management systems will often combine monitoring data with automation and orchestration to bring autonomy to some problem remediation.

Effortless Monitoring, Powerful Results: Try Alerty's Free APM Today

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management.

Technology Support for Issue Resolution

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js

Database Monitoring by Alerty

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS
  • Tracks CPU usage and memory consumption

Alerty features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel. 

Alerty: AI-Powered Monitoring Made Easy

  • Simplifies setup with AI
  • Cost-effective compared to competitors
  • Designed for ease of use
  • Integrates with tools like Sentry

Catch issues today before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution!

Why Do You Need Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring offers several benefits to the enterprise regarding organizational effectiveness, reputation or brand, and long-term cost efficiencies. 

Organizational Benefits of Application Delivery

  • Improved cooperation
  • Enhanced collaboration

Types of Monitoring in Application Management

Front-end Monitoring

Oversees user experience (UX) from the user's standpoint.

Back-end Monitoring

Manages services and dependencies, like critical databases.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Ensures well-configured and functional infrastructure, whether local or cloud-based.

How APM Protects Your Brand Reputation

APM initiatives must break down these traditional silos for 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. 

Why Application Health Matters

This can result in lower application utilization, slower application adoption, and less revenue for the business. Ensuring that the application works well is a wise strategy for any business that relies on its applications or software services.

APM: Your Investment in Preventing Costly Downtime

The corollary to revenue is cost. 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. 

The Hidden Costs of Poor Application Performance

Application monitoring helps identify problems for rapid correction. Sometimes, prompt remediation can occur before users know an issue. The cost of APM can bring direct cost savings in unneeded application downtime and troubleshooting.

Application Monitoring Strategy Requirements For Implementing APM

Comprehensive Monitoring

Comprehensive monitoring involves closely monitoring every aspect of your application's health. This approach helps you detect and diagnose issues regardless of their origin. You can quickly pinpoint and resolve problems efficiently by monitoring the infrastructure and application.

Real-Time Alerts and Notifications

Just like a firefighter relies on alarms to detect and extinguish fires promptly, real-time alerts and notifications act as your immediate warnings for application issues. 

Setting Alerts for Crucial Metrics

  • CPU usage
  • Error rates
  • Response times

Stay informed and address issues swiftly with configured alerts on these critical metrics.

User Experience Monitoring

End-user experience is paramount to any application's success. With User Experience Monitoring (RUM), you can understand how users interact with your application in real time. This monitoring style allows you to identify and address issues impacting user satisfaction and overall application performance.

Root Cause Analysis

When issues arise, it's vital to resolve them and investigate the root cause thoroughly. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) helps you identify the underlying reasons for problems by analyzing logs, traces, and metrics. This comprehensive approach enables you to implement preventive measures and ensure more stable and reliable applications.

Performance Optimization

Optimizing an application's performance is akin to fine-tuning a high-performance vehicle. Regular analysis of performance data helps you identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. 

Enhancing Application Performance

  • Code optimization
  • Query tuning
  • Efficient resource allocation

Continuous optimization ensures your application is ready for future growth and increasing demands.

Adopt A Proactive Approach

APM strategies have evolved beyond merely detecting existing issues, allowing IT teams to predict potential problems preemptively. By leveraging historical data and advanced metrics, you can identify vulnerabilities, potential trouble areas, and root causes before they escalate.

Manage Moving Parts

Many online businesses rely on third-party services, making it crucial to monitor these applications regularly and ensure that service level agreements (SLAs) are met. APM tools enable you to use advanced analytics to identify performance issues caused by third-party services. This proactive approach allows faster responses in addressing problematic assets to sustain optimal performance levels.

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What Does APM Measure: Metrics You Should Track

Key Functions of Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

  • Observes app behavior
  • Alerts and collects data on issues
  • Analyzes data for business impact assessment
  • Adapts apps to preemptively address similar issues

The most critical application monitoring metrics include CPU usage, error rates, response time or mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR), number of instances, request rates, application availability, garbage collection (GC), and user experience.

8 Application Performance Monitoring Best Practices

1. Select the Right Tool for the Job

Select APM tools based on the application's monitoring needs and operational environment. Simple tools might be inflexible or inadequate, while complex tools might be too difficult to manage or underutilized. Shop around, use proof-of-principle testing, and choose the most appropriate APM tool.

2. Select Metrics and Collect Data Carefully

More data isn't always better. Decide what data is most beneficial for the specific application and then implement APM to collect and process the most relevant data.

3. Create Processes Based on APM

Collecting data and sending alerts have no value if nobody knows what to do about it. Understand what happens when issues arise and develop processes and procedures to handle issues such as application downtime or performance disruptions as soon as they occur.

4. Create Manageable Processes

Establishing a process, from generating alerts to crafting automated responses to issues, should be a dynamic effort revisited and updated regularly as application and business needs change. Creating static processes and implementing APM tools that are hard to maintain can make APM efforts far more problematic for an organization.

5. Test and Validate

Ensure that any data and metrics collected by an APM tool are valid. Just because a business implements an APM tool doesn't mean that the tool is working. If the tool stops generating data, the issue should be resolved immediately.

6. Review Reporting

Take the time to review reports and consider trends in the metrics. APM reporting can be a vital foundation for infrastructure upgrades, capacity planning, and even new software fixes and optimizations.

7. Automate Your Monitoring

Automating your monitoring can help you quickly identify trends in your system and respond to spikes and dips in data. This is crucial for ensuring application performance and uptime, especially when responding to load demands on your infrastructure. With automation, you can set up automated alerting and load balancing, responding faster than a human notification.

8. Focus on Security and Compliance

Did you know that over 29,000 new vulnerabilities were identified in 2023 alone? Not all of these vulnerabilities were introduced in the coding process; most were passed from application components like libraries or frameworks. 

Building a Secure Application Fortress

While attacks have historically happened at the network and infrastructure level, the attack surface of applications is ever-increasing. This is why integrating security and compliance into your application monitoring practices is imperative. It’s not just about monitoring uptime and resource utilization anymore; it’s about building a fortress around your applications through periodic vulnerability detection, access control, and compliance checks.

Alerty Keeps Your Startup Running Smoothly

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service designed specifically for developers and early-stage startups. This powerful tool offers various monitoring services, including:

  • Application performance monitoring,
  •  Database monitoring
  • Incident management

 Alerty supports various technologies commonly used by developers, such as:

  •  NextJS
  • React
  •  Vue
  •  Node.js

 By leveraging Alerty, developers can easily identify and resolve application issues, ensuring optimal end-user performance. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!

Challenges Associated With APM

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) challenges can make it difficult for organizations to implement and maintain an effective application performance monitoring strategy. 

Some key challenges of APM include: 

  • Complexity
  • Lack of visibility
  • Scalability
  • Skill gaps
  • Cost

Monitoring Modern, Complex Applications

Modern applications are complex, distributed, and dynamic, making it challenging to monitor their performance. Traditional monitoring tools often lack visibility into the entire application stack, making identifying and resolving performance issues challenging. 

Addressing Challenges of Growth and Cost

As applications and infrastructure grow, scaling APM solutions to keep up with the growth becomes increasingly difficult. Hiring and retaining skilled APM professionals can be a costly and time-consuming process for organizations. Implementing and maintaining APM solutions can be expensive, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. However, using tools like Alerty can significantly reduce costs.

How To Choose An Application Performance Monitoring Tool

Evaluate Deployment and Management Ease

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 and User-Friendly Reporting in APM Tools

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 apparent, actionable insights can enhance the effectiveness of your monitoring strategy.

Ensure the Tool Meets Your Security Standards

Security, data protection, and privacy are critical considerations when choosing application monitoring tools, especially for applications that handle sensitive data. Ensure that the tool complies with industry standards and regulations relevant to your business, such as: 

  • GDPR
  • HIPAA
  • PCI DSS

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. 

Enhancing Security and Compliance

  • Data retention control
  • Access controls
  • Audit logs management

These capabilities ensure security and compliance requirements are met effectively.

Automation

These days, automation is the name of the game. Manually keeping up with all aspects of your IT environment is nearly impossible—at the very least, it will cost you a ton and run your teams ragged. You will want a tool that leverages automation, with features like automated alerts, automated report generation, or automated incident remediation, to reduce the manual workload that falls to your IT and DevOps teams.

Scalability

Rather than upgrading your APM tools as your business grows, you’ll want a solution that can scale seamlessly with it. 

Key Features to Look for in a Data Analytics Tool

  • Collect data from mobile and desktop environments
  • Aggregate data seamlessly
  • Store data securely
  • Analyze data for actionable insights

Root Cause Analysis and Remediation

Look for a tool that automatically detects changes, issues and incidents and provides the information in context. This helps drastically decrease the time required to investigate and address the root cause of issues impacting your applications.

Intelligent Alerting and Root Cause Analysis for Faster MTTR

A solution with threshold-based smart alerts, automatic detection and correlation of events, issues and service incidents, and automatic identification of each incident’s likely root cause will result in the fastest mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Integration Capabilities

You will likely employ many different tools in managing your IT environment, and the better they work together, the more efficient your workflows will be. For instance, 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.

Related Reading

Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's Free APM Solution

Alerty is a cutting-edge cloud monitoring service that caters to the needs of developers and early-stage startups. With a comprehensive suite of features like application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management, Alerty is your go-to solution for running your applications smoothly.

Cutting-edge Technology Support

Alerty: Support for Diverse Technologies

  • Supports NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js
  • Ensures coverage for various tech stacks
  • Helps developers identify and resolve issues promptly
  • Ensures applications run at peak performance

Database Monitoring Made Easy

Optimizing Database Performance With Alerty:

  • Monitors Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS
  • Tracks key metrics: CPU usage and memory consumption
  • Optimizes database performance

Incident Management and Real User Monitoring

Alerty features quick incident management tools, ensuring you can promptly address any issues. Its Real User Monitoring (RUM) capabilities also allow you to optimize user experience, leading to higher user satisfaction and retention rates.

Universal Service Monitoring

Alerty's Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like the Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel, giving you a comprehensive view of your application's ecosystem. By monitoring these dependencies, you can ensure that your application's integrations are running smoothly.

AI-driven Simplified Setup

Alerty uses artificial intelligence to simplify setup, making it easy for developers to get started quickly. By providing a cost-effective solution compared to its competitors, Alerty ensures that monitoring your application's performance doesn't break the bank.

Seamless Integration With Essential Tools

Alerty integrates seamlessly with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams that need efficient, affordable monitoring solutions. By catching issues before they affect users, Alerty ensures that your applications always deliver a top-notch user experience.

Stop app outages before they happen! Get Alerty's free APM to monitor performance and proactively keep your users happy.