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How Do You Monitor Web Application? Best Practices & 15 Best Tools

You're not alone if you’re struggling to keep your website's performance metrics in check. Slow-loading pages, broken links, and error messages are just some of the issues plaguing a web application and ruining the user experience. With front-end monitoring tools, you can keep track of your site’s performance, fix problems before users notice them, and ensure optimal performance at all times. This article will help you understand how to monitor web applications to keep your users happy and boost your business.

Alerty’s frontend monitoring solution provides detailed performance metrics of your web applications to help you improve speed, reliability, and user experience. With this tool, you can monitor your site’s performance over time, pinpointing any issues that may arise and tracking their resolution.

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Table of Contents

What Is Web Application Monitoring?

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Web application monitoring gives IT the power to identify and fix web application performance issues before they affect end users. It allows IT operations to quickly pinpoint critical problems with web applications that impact business performance and resolve them before users notice. Web application monitoring can be implemented as a Javascript agent injected directly into the client web browser or with a network monitoring appliance that tracks packets across the wire.

Synthetic Monitoring

Both of these methods are forms of real-user monitoring. Web application performance can also be monitored by running synthetic transactions against the website or web app at regular intervals from robots stationed worldwide. Web application monitoring is rarely implemented in isolation. 

Unless an issue originates in the front end, it’s important to be able to dive into the back end of the problematic web transaction with an application performance monitoring (APM) solution to respond quickly. A fully integrated approach is ideal.

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Why Is Web Application Monitoring Crucial For Businesses

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Statistics reveal that even a second's delay in your webpage or application load time could reduce your page views by approximately 11% and consumer satisfaction by around 16%. From a business perspective, this is lethal. 

You must ensure your website or web application is up 24/7. Monitoring your web applications will provide you with several benefits. Not only can you detect issues in your web application quickly and fix them before harm can come, but you can also maximize its performance.

Quick Error Detection

Errors and issues can pop up anytime, no matter how good your code is or how secure your systems are. These errors, bugs, and other issues can affect your application's performance and security. Ultimately, your end-users will notice it and won't be happy about it. If you don't fix it sooner, the issues can get bigger, annoy the users, and perhaps lead to:

  • Vulnerabilities 
  • Cybersecurity risks

This is why detecting issues early is crucial; web application monitoring tools do that for you. They will help you catch errors immediately when they emerge and notify you so you can fix them quickly.

Instant Downtime Alerts

Your web application can go offline or become unavailable for many reasons, such as:

  • Server failure
  • Cyberattacks
  • Disasters

Downtime Impact

Whatever the reason, application downtimes are harmful to your business. They affect:

  • User experience sales
  • Revenue

You must know when downtimes happen. Using a web application monitoring tool, you can get downtime information immediately. It will also enable you to inform your customers to reduce their hassles, and they will know you care for them. It builds better user trust.

Enhanced Security

Cyber attackers are constantly looking for vulnerabilities in web applications that they can:

  • Leverage to hack into data
  • Harm your business

If you don't treat your security issues on time, there are higher chances of malicious attacks, data theft, and reputation damage. It may also invite compliance risks and penalties. Using a web application monitoring tool can detect security issues quickly and handle them on time.

Security Maintenance

You can also run security patches, renew certificates, and fix other security loopholes in your web application so attackers cannot hack it and it remains:

  • Safe
  • Secure

Better Performance

Applications can slow down over time due to components and infrastructure used for service delivery and connectivity between:

  • Components
  • User interface

Resource Optimization

Network latency, bandwidth, CPU, memory, and disk space utilization can also impact your application's performance. Therefore, you need to optimize your application for these issues so that it can perform and function well. 

This will enhance your application's loading speed and help you deliver an excellent user experience. Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today! 

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How Do You Monitor Web Application?

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Performance Monitoring: Keep an Eye on Your Web Application at All Times

Performance monitoring tracks key performance indicators like:

This data helps identify bottlenecks and performance degradation in real time.

Code-Level Insights

Application Performance Monitoring tools like Alerty provide deep insights at the code level and help debug software applications’ performance problems.

Error Tracking and Diagnostics: Quickly Identify and Resolve Problems

Error tracking and diagnostics automatically detect errors and exceptions within applications and help pinpoint the root cause of issues. This component is crucial for troubleshooting and reducing the mean time to resolution (MTTR). APM tools offer dependency mapping and detailed diagnostics to assist DevOps teams in resolving issues faster.

User Experience Monitoring: Understand Your Users to Improve Application Performance

User experience monitoring analyzes how real users interact with applications, focusing on:

  • Page load times
  • Click paths
  • User engagement

Real User Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring provide insights into actual and simulated user experiences, enhancing the overall end-user experience.

Infrastructure Monitoring: Don't Overlook the Servers Supporting Your Application

Infrastructure monitoring observes the underlying hardware and network infrastructure that supports the application. This level of observability includes:

  • Monitoring servers
  • Databases 
  • Database queries
  • Network devices and their dependencies to confirm they are operating correctly and efficiently. 

Network monitoring tools also track data flow across the entire application environment, from front-end to back-end.

6 Important Metrics To Monitor Web Applications

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1. Speed Matters: Monitoring Response Time

When monitoring web application performance, one of the most critical metrics to track is response time. Response time is when a web app responds to a user interaction or request. This includes the time it takes to:

  • Load pages
  • Execute actions
  • Return requested results

There are various ways to measure the response time: 

  • Average Response Time: Average response time is a useful app performance metric that measures the average response time for requests. 
  • Peak Response Time: Peak response time identifies the longest time the web app takes to respond to a user request, often during peak usage or periods of high load. 
  • Percentile Response Time: This tool provides response times at different percentiles (e.g., 90th, 95th). Thus, it highlights the experience of most users.

2. Maximizing Efficiency: Measuring Throughput

Throughput refers to a web app's capability to process a specific number of transactions or requests within a particular time frame. It helps understand the application’s capacity to handle high workloads. Throughput helps:

  • Monitor an app's performance and scalability
  • Identify resource limitations
  • Ensure optimal resource utilization

Throughput is affected by various factors, such as:

  • Memory
  • Disk I/O
  • Network bandwidth

3. Staying Error-Free: Tracking Error Rates

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: 

  • HTTP Error Percentage: The number or percentage of requests that lead to HTTP error codes.
  • Logged Exceptions: The total count of unhandled and recorded errors in your app.
  • User-Reported Errors: Issues reported directly by users.

4. Ensuring Uptime and Availability

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:

  • Uptime Percentage: The amount of time (%) the application is available.
  • HTTP check: Setting up scheduled HTTP checks is a great way to monitor an app’s availability. It involves sending HTTP requests to the application at regular intervals.
  • Downtime: Number of times the app is unavailable.

5. Resource Utilization: Monitoring CPU, Memory, and More

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: 

  • CPU Usage: Percentage of CPU resources being utilized. High CPU usage on your server causes application performance issues. When tracking CPU usage, it’s crucial to track it per server. And it’s equally essential to aggregate or combine the CPU usage data from all these individual instances of your app across various servers. 
  • Network Bandwidth: Amount of data sent over the network. 
  • Memory Usage: Amount of RAM being consumed by the application. This metric helps us understand how the app consumes and manages resources. 
  • Disk I/O: Rate of data read and written to disk storage.

6. User Satisfaction

User satisfaction metrics help us understand the end-user experience and overall satisfaction with the application. These metrics include: 

  • Page Load Time: Time requires to fully load a web page, including images, HTML, CSS, JavaScript code, and other assets. 
  • pdex Score: The Application Performance Index is essentially a score that indicates users’ satisfaction with the web app's performance. This includes the time a web app requires to respond to user requests. 
  • User Feedback: Direct feedback from users regarding their experience. 
  • Session Duration: The time users spend interacting with the application.

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7 Best Practices For Web App Monitoring

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1. Set Meaningful Alerts: Get Notified for the Right Issues

Calibrating monitoring systems to notify teams about critical events while minimizing noise from false alarms is crucial. Instead of getting alerted for every performance dip, you want to be notified of actionable issues tied to significant performance thresholds or anomalies requiring attention. 

Structuring alerts around business-critical metrics ensures teams focus on issues impacting:

  • Application performance
  • User satisfaction

2. Leverage Real User Monitoring: Understand the Customer's Experience

Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures and analyzes user interactions with applications in real time, offering insights into user experiences across different devices and networks. This visibility into user behavior and application performance from the user’s perspective is invaluable for:

  • Identifying usability issues
  • Optimizing content delivery
  • Personalizing user experiences

Implementing RUM enables organizations to make data-driven decisions about UX improvements and performance optimizations. Businesses can ensure their applications meet and exceed user expectations by focusing on real-world user feedback.

3. Utilize Log Management and Analysis: Get the Complete Picture

Effective log management and analysis entail collecting, storing, and analyzing log data from applications and underlying infrastructure. This comprehensive log data provides a granular view of application behavior, facilitating:

  • Troubleshooting
  • Security monitoring
  • Compliance auditing

Automated log analysis tools can detect patterns and anomalies indicative of operational or security issues, enabling proactive resolution.

4. Leverage Chaos Engineering for Resilience Testing: Build for Failure

Chaos engineering involves intentionally introducing disruptions to applications or infrastructure to assess resilience and recovery capabilities. By simulating real-world incidents, teams can identify weaknesses in their systems before they impact users, allowing for strategic improvements in reliability and performance. 

This practice encourages a proactive approach to system design, focusing on building systems that can recover from unexpected failures.

5. Monitor Across Multiple Dimensions: Get Holistic Visibility

Comprehensive application monitoring spans several dimensions:

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.

6. Map Application Dependencies: Understand the Connections

Understanding and mapping application dependencies is crucial for effective monitoring and troubleshooting. This involves identifying how different components of an application interact with each other and with:

  • External services
  • Databases
  • APIs

Dependency Mapping

Knowing these dependencies helps pinpoint the root causes of performance issues or failures more quickly, as problems in one area can have cascading effects on others. Mapping dependencies is also essential for planning system updates or changes, as it highlights potential impacts on interconnected services. 

By maintaining an up-to-date dependency map, teams can ensure more reliable application performance and reduce downtime during maintenance or unexpected outages.

7. Focus on Security and Compliance: Stay Ahead of Threats

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. While attacks have historically happened at the network and infrastructure level, the attack surface of applications is ever-increasing. 

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
  • Compliance checks

15 Best Web App Monitoring Tools

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1. Alerty: Simple Monitoring Solution For Startups

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:

  • Application performance monitoring
  • Database monitoring
  • Incident management

It supports technologies like

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js

Database Monitoring

Helping developers identify and fix issues. Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption

It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI
  • Vercel

AI-Powered Monitoring

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!

2. Middleware APM: Full-Stack Application Monitoring

Middleware APM is a full-stack application performance monitoring platform that facilitates developers' real-time problem identification and root cause analysis. It interfaces impeccably with multi-tiered applications and is deployable and scalable within environments such as Kubernetes. 

This platform provides on-premise data storage and a single-script installation, enhancing the developer experience. It enables synthetic monitoring for:

  • Expedited troubleshooting
  • Environment monitoring
  • MTTR reduction

3. Dynatrace: For Deep Insights Into Application Performance

Dynatrace is a popular application performance and network monitoring tool. It gives you deep insights into your full application stack. You can monitor your application development environment from top to bottom and understand how everything is connected. 

This platform offers code-level monitoring so you can identify the source of any issue down to the line of code. It can check for vulnerabilities and bugs in your code to help you fix them. Dynatrace has native integrations with many cloud services, including:

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Google Cloud
  • VMware

AI-Driven Monitoring

If you use any of these services, it’s easy to connect your app to Dynatrace to get performance insights. Dynatrace incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to help troubleshoot issues with your app. This AI engine, Davis, continually scans your app to detect flaws before they become expensive problems. 

Dynatrace has an intuitive interface that’s easy to navigate. The main drawback is its price, with full-stack monitoring starting from $0.08 per hour. However, you can use the free trial period to test its features before making your final decision.

4. LogicMonitor: Cloud Monitoring for Applications

LogicMonitor is well-known cloud infrastructure monitoring tool. It offers an application monitoring tool that gives you deep insights into your applications. This tool covers every part of your application architecture, enabling you to identify potential issues or the source of the problems that have already occurred. 

Proactive monitoring helps you prevent potential outages and save time and money. LogicMonitor provides great insights into your user behavior. It delivers these insights in a dashboard that’s easy to navigate and monitor. LogicMonitor was built with a collaborative focus so all your ITOps and DevOps staff can work from a shared dashboard.

Visualized Relationships

It gives them a bird' s-eye view of your application and visualizes the relationships between all app components. This platform works with both hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It scales very well. It can keep monitoring your app as it grows without sacrificing performance. LogicMonitor is known to work very well with large-scale apps. 

Like many APM tools, LogicMonitor has a steep learning curve. It’ll likely be challenging initially, but you can get used to it with time.

5. New Relic: Comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring

New Relic is a well-known web tracking and analytics platform. It offers an application performance monitoring tool that lets enterprises stay on top of their apps and online services. New Relic has integrations with popular cloud services like:

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Google Cloud, so you can easily connect it to your apps hosted on these platforms.

Anomaly Detection

New Relic constantly monitors your apps to detect anomalies and alert you to them. If an issue occurs, you can troubleshoot the app to discover the root cause. It also gives you insights into your code performance to optimize it for better results. 

Unlike most other APM tools, New Relic offers a free version with significant features. The free version supports one user and lets you ingest up to 100GB of data per month. Anything above this feature will need a payment, starting from $0.30 per GB of ingested data. You must also pay a monthly fee of between $49 and $99 for each user.

6. Raygun APM: Real-Time Application Monitoring

Raygun APM is a SaaS server-side performance monitoring platform that provides trend and real-time application and user experience data. The platform supports .NET, Ruby, and Node.js software applications. 

It proactively identifies and alerts customers to performance issues. It also includes an automated issue creation engine that lists the most urgent performance concerns.

7. Scout APM: Detailed Application Performance Monitoring

Scout APM is a performance monitoring platform that provides proactive alerting and real-time insights into the application environment. Offered as SaaS, Scout APM provides error, database, external service, and basic application monitoring. Other features include:

  • Deployment tracking
  • GitHub integration
  • Background job monitoring

8. Site24x7 APM Insight: AI-Powered Application Monitoring

APM Insight is an AI-powered performance monitoring system for tracking application behavior and its effect on users in real-time. APM Insight is offered as a SaaS-based product that can monitor the entire application stack, from the URL down to the database. 

It supports Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Node.js platforms and can track and optimize all transactions.

9. SolarWinds AppOptics: SaaS-Based APM Tool

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:

  • Distributed tracing
  • Live code profiling
  • Exception tracking

10. Stackify Retrace: Performance Management and Observability

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, as well as the ability to create customized log queries.

11. Cisco AppDynamics: Enterprise-Grade APM Tool

Acquired by Cisco in 2017, AppDynamics provides an application and business monitoring platform for today’s enterprises. Their platform includes products for:

  • End User Monitoring (Synthetic and RUM monitoring)
  • Infrastructure Visibility
  • Business Performance to help manage end-to-end performance

Deploying agents throughout the environment, AppDynamics gives teams a view into their app topology, regardless of the environment, through customizable dashboards. These dashboards provide metrics and data to make informed business decisions and drive application performance.

12. Datadog: All-in-One APM Tool

Founded in 2010, the Datadog APM platform analyzes web performance from a comprehensive dashboard. As an all-in-one monitoring service, Datadog can monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance across your stack—hybrid cloud applications, servers, databases, and applications. 

Datadog recently announced its integration with Cloudability, serverless monitoring (AWS Lambda) support and the addition of a synthetic monitoring solution called Datadog Synthetics. A beta version of Datadog Synthetics will be available in December 2018.

13. Smartbear: APM Tool Suite for DevOps Teams

SmartBear builds tools for development, testing, and operations teams to monitor software applications and websites. Their APM suite includes:

  • API lifecycle products
  • Software testing platforms
  • Application monitoring tools
  • Code collaboration
  • Optimization tools

SmartBear recently acquired the continuous testing platform HipTest and the test management solution Zephyr.

14. Prometheus: An Open Source Monitoring Tool

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. 

Prometheus was the second project to graduate from CNCF after Kubernetes. It does not do distributed tracing but can effectively monitor time-series data as metrics. It also has some limitations at scale as it is designed for a single machine. Prometheus's visualization layer is basic, but it is generally used with Grafana, a visualization tool, to create charts and graphs.

15. Javamelody: Open Source Java Application Monitoring

Javamelody is an open-source APM tool for monitoring Java or Java EE applications in QA and production environments. It is mainly used to track and measure the statistics of requests on an application based on its usage.

What To Look For In Web App Monitoring Tools

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Evaluate Deployment and Management Ease

When picking application monitoring tools, the deployment and management ease matter a lot. A tool that is incredibly hard to set up or requires extensive manual configuration can waste valuable time and resources. Seek 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 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 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:

  • 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. The ability to control data retention, access controls, and audit logs can also help meet your security and compliance requirements.

Automation is the Name of the Game

These days, automation is the name of the game. Trying to manually keep 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, report generation, or incident remediation, to reduce the manual workload that falls to your IT and DevOps teams.

Scalability is Key

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

Seek out a tool that can collect, aggregate, store, and analyze data from across your environment—including both mobile and desktop—even as your environment grows more complex, and one that can deliver insights that assist in strategic decision-making.

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. 

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. 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.

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


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

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption

Try Alerty Now

It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its universal service monitoring covers dependencies like:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI
  • Vercel

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! 

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