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What Is Web App Monitoring And Why Is It Important?

Web app monitoring plays a crucial role in application performance monitoring, ensuring your web applications operate seamlessly and efficiently. Imagine you have just launched a new web application, but you need to figure out how users interact with it and how to enhance its performance. This is where Web App Monitoring provides insights into your application's behavior, user interactions, and performance levels.

Alerty's free APM solution is a valuable tool for monitoring and improving the performance of your web applications. With this solution, you can easily access valuable insights into your application's performance, helping you enhance user experiences and boost your online presence.

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Table of Contents

What is Web App Monitoring?

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Application Monitoring Process

Application monitoring is the process of tracking:

  • Software application performance
  • Availability
  • User interactions

It involves:

  • Collecting data related to the application’s operations
  • Analyzing performance metrics
  • Ensuring that the application functions correctly and efficiently. 

Ensuring Optimal User Experience

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 system crashes and failed transactions, to tracking slower-than-expected response times and functional glitches.

Importance of Monitoring

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 

Web application monitoring is rarely implemented in isolation. Unless an issue originates in the front end, it is essential to be able to respond quickly by diving into the back end of the problematic web transaction with an application performance monitoring (APM) solution. A fully integrated approach is ideal.

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How Does Web App Monitoring Work?

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Web Application Monitoring is a complex yet crucial process that helps businesses ensure their online services deliver top-notch performance. 

It begins by defining the “happy paths,” the steps an end-user takes to complete a single website or web service transaction. The monitoring service then creates a script based on these happy paths to conduct regularly scheduled tests, guaranteeing functionality and performance meet expectations.

Validating Functionality Through Automated Steps

To verify that the login process functions properly, the remote computer checkpoint:

  • Uses a browser to navigate to the login page
  • Input a user ID and password
  • Click submit
  • Wait for the response
  • Relay its findings to the web application monitoring company

The monitoring service alerts the website's support team if the checkpoint computer reports unexpected transaction behavior, such as missing page content or slow responses. This monitoring approach facilitates early issue detection and resolution, enabling businesses to maintain smooth, reliable online services. 

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Comprehensive Monitoring Solutions

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Alerty is a trustworthy cloud monitoring service that offers:

  • Application performance monitoring
  • Database monitoring
  • Incident management

It supports technologies like:

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js

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Get Started with Alerty’s Free APM

Alerty utilizes AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. Monitoring applications with Alerty can help businesses manage their online services better, ensuring seamless operations and enhanced user experience.

Upgrade your web application monitoring with Alerty’s free APM solution today and keep your online services running at peak performance!

Why Is Web App Monitoring Important?

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Increase Application Stability

Ensuring your applications are stable is crucial to providing a seamless user experience. Application performance monitoring plays a vital role in achieving this goal. An APM tool can identify possible challenges before they impact an application's stability by monitoring various metrics, such as response times and resource utilization.

By proactively monitoring an application’s performance, you can detect anomalies that could lead to instability. With real-time insights APM tools provide, you can address these issues promptly and prevent them from causing disruptions for your users. This proactive approach to application stability helps maintain a positive reputation for your business and keeps customers satisfied with reliable app experiences.

Improve the Quality of Software Releases

With an APM tool, developers can gather valuable insights into their applications' performance and behavior. They can implement these learnings during the development process itself. This allows them to be aware of any issues or bugs early on, resulting in higher-quality software releases.

With APM, developers can:

  • Monitor code execution
  • Track response times
  • Identify memory leaks
  • Analyze error logs

By continuously monitoring application performance throughout the development cycle, teams can ensure that each release meets high quality and functionality standards.

Gaining Insights with APM

APM tools also provide comprehensive visibility into how an application behaves in different environments and under varying workloads. This helps developers understand how IT infrastructure or configuration changes affect overall performance. With this knowledge, they can make informed decisions and optimize their codebase for better reliability and efficiency.

Reduce Time to Recovery in Case of App Failure

When an application fails or experiences performance issues, time is of the essence in resolving the problem. APM plays a crucial role in reducing the time to recovery in such cases. By continuously monitoring performance metrics, APM tools can quickly detect failures within an app, allowing IT teams to address them before they can escalate further.

Rapid Issue Resolution

With APM, IT teams can receive alerts, notifications, and detailed insights about:

  • Errors
  • Crashes
  • Slow response times
  • Other performance bottlenecks 

With this information, assisted by APM's collaborative features, they can swiftly investigate the root cause of an issue and take immediate corrective actions.

Boost App Uptime

When an app experiences downtime frustrates users and can lead to potential revenue loss. APM tools help identify and address issues that could cause downtime, ensuring your app stays up and running smoothly.

An APM tool can alert you to any risk of downtime by continuously monitoring your application's performance. This would allow you to take immediate remedial action before users are impacted. An APM tool will provide real-time insights into the health of an application’s infrastructure, enabling you to prepare fixes and schedule maintenance without causing any downtime. 

Drive Engineering Productivity and Collaboration

Another important benefit of application performance monitoring is driving engineering productivity and collaboration. By providing real-time insights into an app’s performance, APM tools enable engineers to identify inefficiencies in the code. 

This allows them to optimize their code and improve efficiency, increasing productivity. In addition, APM tools facilitate collaboration among different teams involved in app development and maintenance.

With a centralized platform that provides visibility into the entire application stack, information about performance issues can be easily communicated and shared by:

  • Developers
  • Operations teams
  • Other stakeholders 

This leads to faster problem resolution and smoother team workflows, improving collaboration and more efficient development processes.

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7 Best Practices For Web App Monitoring

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1. Set Meaningful Alerts

To monitor web applications effectively, setting up meaningful and actionable alerts is crucial. These alerts should be calibrated to notify teams about critical events while minimizing false alarms. By structuring alerts around business-critical metrics, teams can focus on issues that impact application performance and user satisfaction.

2. Leverage Real User Monitoring

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a powerful tool that captures and analyzes user interactions with applications in real time. This provides insights into actual user experiences across different devices and networks. Leveraging RUM allows organizations to make data-driven decisions about user experience improvements and performance optimizations, ensuring their applications exceed user expectations.

3. Utilize Log Management and Analysis

An effective monitoring strategy involves utilizing log management and analysis. This entails:

  • Collecting
  • Storing
  • Analyzing log data from applications and underlying infrastructure

With this comprehensive log data, teams can:

  • Troubleshoot issues
  • Monitor security
  • Conduct compliance audits. 

Automated log analysis tools can also detect patterns and anomalies to enable proactive issue resolution.

4. Leverage Chaos Engineering for Resilience Testing

Chaos engineering involves introducing intentional disruptions to applications or infrastructure to assess resilience and recovery capabilities. By simulating real-world incidents, teams can identify weaknesses in systems before they impact users, leading to strategic improvements in reliability and performance. This practice encourages a proactive approach to system design, focusing on building resilient systems.

5. Monitor Across Multiple Dimensions

Comprehensive application monitoring extends across:

  • Performance
  • User experience
  • Security
  • Infrastructure health

Unified Monitoring

Monitoring these dimensions provides a holistic view of the application, enabling a more effective response to issues. By integrating different monitoring tools and approaches, teams can ensure coverage across all critical application functions and performance.

6. Map Application Dependencies

Understanding and mapping application dependencies is essential for effective:

  • Monitoring 
  • Troubleshooting

This involves identifying how different application components interact with each other and external services. By maintaining an up-to-date dependency map, teams can quickly pinpoint performance issues or failures, reducing downtime during maintenance or unexpected outages.

7. 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 of them were passed from application components like libraries or frameworks. 

Integrating Security and Compliance into Monitoring

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 to protect against vulnerabilities and attacks. 

Organizations can build a fortress around their applications by incorporating:

  • Periodic vulnerability detection
  • Access control
  • Compliance checks

This proactive approach safeguards applications from potential threats and vulnerabilities.

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Web App Monitoring Tools

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Alerty

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 Performance Monitoring

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS

These databases track key metrics like:

  • CPU usage 
  • Memory consumption

Enhanced User Experience & Streamlined Management

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.

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

Veracode

Veracode aims to prevent security breaches by regularly scanning numerous aspects of your web applications to locate any potential vulnerabilities. This includes:

  • Securing container technologies before production
  • Finding and rectifying runtime web app vulnerabilities
  • Locating and fixing flaws as you write code
  • Leveraging the skills of experienced penetration testers to guarantee the security of your entire web applications

Netreo

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. Also, Netreo’s solution utilizes automation to offer instant visual confirmation of new network devices from any size enterprise, with minimal configuration and maintenance.

Site24x7

Site24x7 is the next tool to be added to the list of leading web application monitoring tools. It is an AI-powered all-in-one monitoring solution with numerous monitoring tools for:

  • Application performance
  • Website
  • Server

Monitoring Languages & User Experience

The tool offers a variety of capabilities for mobile platforms to highlight application servers and app components that are generating errors, but for web applications, you can monitor for: 

  • Java
  • .NET
  • Ruby
  • PHP
  • Node.js

You can measure specific user actions and highlight potential bottlenecks affecting end-user experience.

Raygun

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, capturing the complete lifecycle of incoming web requests to help quickly identify and resolve issues.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics aims to go beyond traditional web application tools by enabling software-defined businesses with innovative, 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

IBM Instana is an application performance monitoring (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.

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What To Look For In Web App Monitoring Tools

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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 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.

Ensure the Tool Meets Your Security Standards

Here are critical considerations when choosing application monitoring tools, especially for applications that handle sensitive data:

  • Security
  • Data protection
  • Privacy

Ensure the tool complies with industry standards and regulations relevant to your business, such as:

  • GDPR
  • HIPAA
  • PCI DSS

Prioritizing Data Security

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. These abilities can also help meet your security and compliance requirements.:

  • Control data retention
  • Access controls
  • Audit logs 

Automation

These days, automation is the name of the game. Maintaining 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 to reduce the manual workload that falls to your IT and DevOps teams with features like:

  • Automated alerts
  • Automated report generation
  • Automated incident remediation

Scalability

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
  • Analyze data from across your environment

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, problems, 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.

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Related Reading

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. It offers a range of monitoring capabilities to help organizations monitor their applications and databases. 

Application Performance Monitoring

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: 

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.

Alerty's APM solution makes it easier for developers to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and optimize their applications for an improved user experience.

Database Monitoring With Alerty

In addition to APM, Alerty also provides database monitoring capabilities for popular databases like: 

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS

Enhancing User Experience with Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Universal Service Monitoring

Alerty incorporates Real User Monitoring (RUM) into its feature set. This enables users to optimize the overall user experience by tracking and analyzing user interactions with the web application. Developers can make informed decisions to enhance usability and performance by providing insights into user behavior. 

The Universal Service Monitoring feature of Alerty extends monitoring capabilities to external dependencies such as the:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI
  • Vercel

This comprehensive monitoring approach ensures that developers have a holistic view of their application's performance and can address issues promptly.

Leveraging AI for Simplified Setup and Cost-Effective Monitoring Solutions

One of Alerty's standout features is using artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify the setup process. This makes it easier for developers to get started monitoring their web applications. By automating certain aspects of the setup, Alerty reduces the time and effort required to implement monitoring, allowing users to focus on improving their applications. 

Alerty offers a cost-effective monitoring solution compared to its competitors, making it an attractive option for developers and small teams with budget constraints. The platform's affordability and robust feature set make it a valuable tool for those seeking efficient and affordable monitoring solutions.

Seamless Integration with Tools and Quick Incident Management for Efficient Monitoring

Alerty further distinguishes itself by offering seamless integration with popular tools such as Sentry, enhancing the monitoring experience for users already relying on these tools. Alerty streamlines the monitoring process by integrating with existing workflows, enabling developers to leverage their preferred tools seamlessly. 

The platform features quick incident management capabilities, allowing users to respond swiftly to critical incidents and minimize downtime. This proactive approach ensures that developers can address issues promptly and maintain the reliability of their web applications.

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