Reasons to Monitor Your Web App

How does your organization monitor your web app? Most enterprises choose application performance monitoring (APM) software to achieve primary goals like functionality, speed and availability, which ensures user experience. There are also other critical reasons why it is important to monitor your web app. Here are a few monitoring tips you should consider.

Website and Web-based Application Monitoring

As a consumer, you know how frustrating it is when visiting a website and experience slow load times. Monitoring a website or a web-based application is important as you want to understand what the user experiences during each step of deployment. Web performance monitoring allows you to gain insight in real time to ensure your website, landing pages and applications are responsive, loading properly and working as it should without errors. Paths you want to check include document object model (DOM) load time, which is the period from the initialization to the content load; the page load, which is the time it takes to load documents; and the user experience, which is what your user experiences both physically or emotionally during the time the website page loads.

Mobile App Monitoring

Nearly half of the people accessing the web use a mobile phone to do it, which makes mobile app monitoring a critical component to online businesses. When monitoring mobile applications, your information technology (IT) team wants to follow the same policy and procedures set up for websites and applications as well as mobile carrier performance and device configurations that disrupt usage.

API Monitoring

Application programming interfaces (APIs) play a pivotal role as they determine how software interacts. They are also used by developers to create blocks that programmers use to build with. If you create the APIs for your own site or others, you need to monitor them in testing, production and deployment to establish a reference point for APM insight. Metrics you need to look at include response times, availability and data request quality.

Cloud Application Monitoring

Cloud computing and migration are now a critical part of many business functions because of the need for more cloud-based application usage, compute, storage, servers, scalability and network backups. Many companies now either use some or full cloud computing infrastructures. For this reason, cloud application monitoring is vital as it allows users to understand the end user experience. As your entire industry standing is in the cloud, you need to ensure that your applications are available and working as they are supposed to. Monitoring allows you to identify ways to enhance the cloud user experience, app performance, traffic and data oversight.

Develop an APM Strategy

Taking the time to develop an APM strategy ensures your IT team is ready for the complications that occur with hardware, software or cloud-based services. With the use of APM tools, your administrators can access data logs and discover and segregate the issues quickly. The use of APM software also provides your IT team with the tools necessary to oversee network or cloud-based application performance. You have the metrics necessary to collect data logs from a singular application or an entire infrastructure regarding central processing unit (CPU) usage, memory, storage or bandwidth.

As your team has access to information on the APM dashboard, there are a number of things you gain from log files or inefficiencies during real-time monitoring and testing. It is vital that your strategy contains the steps necessary that your IT teams must take including teams that must be notified after irregularities take place. As IT professionals want to access the data logs, using the dashboard saves time and energy. Your strategy must note what occurs after issues take place and who is responsible for repairs.

What an APM Measures

APM tools collect data all types of data that play a part in application performance. From the infrastructure to the application deployment and performance, monitoring tools are the most critical components to process CPU utilization, data mining and logging activities. APM also tracks errors, application failures and code execution. Finding bottlenecks that deter user experience is a critical part of a business’s operations, so applications need to deploy correctly.

IT professionals who use APM helps avoid many of the problems by being proactive. By creating a protocol and using APM tools like alerts and monitoring correctly, it is easier to overcome problems when they arise. It also makes it easier to identify issues and prioritize them based on business-critical functions, the need for further scrutiny and what issues are not important.