With the rise of digital transformation and the increasing reliance on applications for business operations, the need for application performance management (APM) has become more critical. In today's fast-paced business environment, even a few minutes of application downtime can result in significant financial losses and damage to a company's reputation. Having an optimum application performance strategy helps organizations ensure that their applications are performing at their best, deliver a seamless experience to end users, and maintain their competitive edge.

This blog explains what APM is all about, its significance and key features.

What is APM?

Application performance management is a practice that involves the process of managing, monitoring, measuring, and optimizing the performance and availability of software applications to meet expected levels of service. It involves constant tracking of application performance and helps detect, diagnose, and resolve complex performance issues to ensure applications run efficiently to meet end-user expectations.

Why Is APM Important?

In an era of rapid digital change, businesses depend heavily on software applications to accomplish their everyday activities. As contemporary apps become more complex and user experience expectations rise, organizations use numerous software technologies to provide excellent performance and maintain a competitive edge. Even brief network outages can significantly disrupt daily operations, leading to dissatisfied customers, substantial revenue losses, and overall harm to the company's brand reputation.

Maintaining peak application performance continuously can be demanding since managing and tracking various application components in real time is crucial for optimal performance. Gaining complete visibility into the front end and back end components of your application is crucial for sustaining flawless business operations and a seamless user experience. Having a robust APM solution is essential.

What Are the Challenges in APM?

Numerous difficulties emerge with APM because of the intricate nature of monitoring an application's performance across an entire infrastructure. Although challenges might differ based on the application's architecture (for example, hybrid or microservices), there are some common challenges that apply to all architectures, including:

■ Complexity of IT infrastructures: As various elements can influence the performance of your application, monitoring these components can be challenging, particularly in complex infrastructure that involves hybrid or microservices architecture.

■ Multiple metrics: Since APM involves a wide range of components in an IT infrastructure, tracking a multitude of metrics is mandatory.

■ Distribution of data: Integrating and evaluating performance data from diverse origins poses difficulties, particularly while dealing with hybrid or microservices infrastructures.

■ Performance blind spots: In hybrid and microservice applications, aligning performance management steps between on-premises servers and public cloud services, and might result in discrepancies, possibly causing unidentified problems.

■ Lack of skillset: Handling and examining APM data requires a skilled professional because creating an efficient application performance management plan becomes difficult.

■ High cost: Utilizing a successful APM solution can come with a hefty price tag and can significantly increase expenses when your application infrastructure needs to be expanded.

What Are the Key Features of an APM Solution?

Having complete visibility into your application infrastructure is vital for achieving top-notch performance. Here are the key features essential for devising an effective APM strategy:

Real-time application performance monitoring

Monitoring your application's performance is essential to streamline business operations. Continual performance tracking helps detect application functionality issues. Gaining real-time performance insights at the code level helps pinpoint issues so they can be resolved before they impact overall business operations.

Here are the essential features an APM solution should provide to optimize application performance:

■ Transaction tracing: A software application fulfills sequential actions to complete a task. During the execution of these actions, the transactions might encounter issues that impact overall application performance, such as slow response times, connectivity problems, memory leaks, or errors. It is crucial to have a thorough understanding of the performance of individual transactions to pinpoint the root cause of problems and to improve the overall performance of the application.

In a world of microservices, where countless small components perform method calls to one another, it is difficult to understand the true state of your application. Debugging issues is a daunting task that requires tracing the pathways of communication between services, potentially involving multiple platforms and languages. When an error arises, it is crucial to swiftly identify the affected service and alert the appropriate team to rectify the fault. It is important to have distributed tracing capabilities in microservices environments to ensure the performance, scalability, and maintainability of applications.

■ Database operations: It is essential to track database calls to evaluate query performance and to identify delays when communicating with database servers within an application. By obtaining comprehensive insights into the performance of the database, it becomes easier to determine whether any problems are due to suboptimal queries or inefficient resources and enables you to take quick measures to improve the overall performance of the application.

■ Thread profiling: When an application needs to complete a task, it initiates a sequence of method calls that involves handling multiple thread requests at the same time. Utilizing thread profiling, you gain insights into the currently active threads in the application, which enables you to pinpoint problematic threads in the stack trace that hinder the overall performance of your application.

■ Service maps: Within an application infrastructure, multiple hosts and services work together to execute business operations. Monitoring each host and service separately is important to ensure optimal performance, but having a visual representation of resource status and the connections between service components allows for comprehensive understanding of the application's structure in a single glance. This simplifies the process of identifying problematic elements in the code and enables tracking transaction traces as they flow through the application.

■ Error tracking: A strong application performance monitoring tool detects and provides comprehensive information about errors and exceptions at the code level. Although these might occur during regular business operations, understanding the specific types of errors and exceptions in your application can streamline the processes of pinpointing and fixing problematic code elements. Ultimately, this safeguards your business infrastructure from unforeseen performance issues.

Digital experience monitoring

For any business application to thrive, it is crucial to ensure a satisfactory digital experience for users. While application performance monitoring offers insights into optimizing back-end functionality at the code level, it is equally important to monitor the front end to ensure a seamless and positive user experience. By obtaining a comprehensive view of the front-end performance of your application, you gain a better understanding of how digital services operate and how users interact with them in real time. This often leads to improved user satisfaction, cost savings, customer retention, and increased revenue.

Application discovery and dependency mapping

Effective APM requires thorough management of various infrastructure components which entails understanding the individual components and their interconnections within the application infrastructure. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of how different resources interact in an application helps you rapidly pinpoint affected resources during performance issues so you can initiate proactive resolutions, prevent problem escalations, and minimize downtime to ensure a smooth user experience.

Infrastructure monitoring

In managing application performance, it's vital to see all the systems and components behind a business application. This means looking at servers, databases, virtual machines, containers, middleware, application servers, web servers, and other back-end parts, regardless of whether they are cloud native, on-premises, or hybrid. Monitoring infrastructure health enables you to spot problems before they affect performance, keeping the application running smoothly and efficiently.

Application analytics

Gaining an overview of the performance of your application infrastructure is vital for tracking and measuring the performance of your applications over time. Monitoring your entire application stack is beneficial for performance tracking, and obtaining deep insights into how your application performs gives you a comprehensive understanding of how your application infrastructure is functioning, particularly when your application operates in a hybrid or microservices architecture.

Plan Your Application Performance Management Strategy Effectively

For businesses operating in a fiercely competitive market, achieving optimal application performance is crucial for achieving success. ManageEngine Applications Manager is a highly effective solution for application performance management that provides in-depth analysis of critical application components. An effective APM solution, like Applications Manager, delivers digital experience monitoring, application dependency mapping, infrastructure monitoring, and intelligent performance analytics. This tool enables businesses to deliver top-notch application performance with a seamless user experience, increased efficiency, and reduced downtime. This robust APM software empowers you to maximize applications to outperform your competitors.