What Is APM? 9 Features Every Enterprise Needs

What is APM? APM stands for application performance monitoring as well as application performance management. Depending on its usage, APM refers to monitoring of an application’s performance or the management of an entire information technology (IT) infrastructure. Either way, application performance monitoring or management is essential for application performance optimization. Here are nine features every enterprise needs to improve the user experience.

APM Monitoring Tools

While the definition of APM is somewhat universal, it covers everything related to performance whether it is a physical infrastructure or cloud-based. APM is also used to provide a variety of enterprise solutions. The three APM monitoring tool types include code profiling and transaction performance, application metrics and network-based performance measurement.

Fast and Reliable Metrics

APM software performs many web application tasks, but the most critical element is its ability to identify assess logs and web requests to determine performance issues quickly. APM software also notifies your development operations (DevOps) team when pages are slowing running or what applications are unresponsive. It allows your technicians to explore the issue further and determine what applications, connectivity, databases, structured query language (SQL) queries, transactions or web requests are affected.

Must-have APM Features for Developers

Developers rely on APM data insights to identify the root cause of an application problem. Here are nine must-have features of APM that identify app issues.

1. Performance Measurement

Performance measurement is a critical component that determines user accessibility. It is also a tool that allows you to understand transactions and web requests better. Once you determine the most popular applications, apps with slow responses and web requests, you will be able to add them to your backlog for further analysis and progress.

2. Code Profiling

Code profiling is essential as you will need to understand it to figure out why applications are lagging, errors are occurring and why software failures occur. Knowing that an application has issues and figuring out the reason why requires coding knowledge, but more importantly, it requires APM software know-how to use coding tools properly.

3. Performance of App Dependencies

A common issue is the performance of applications, which often occurs with an uptick in traffic. It is generally an application dependency mapping issue due to an uptick in traffic, which produce common issues like web errors or slow SQL queries.

4. Troubleshooting Tools

Troubleshooting tools like transaction tracing and APM logging are critical as it allows DevOps teams to find coding issues and how the end user’s experience was affected.

5. Monitoring Metrics

While some software provides basic monitoring and analytics, application performance monitoring oversees an entire infrastructure from servers to central processing unit (CPU) and memory storage. It also provides cloud-based metrics that easily integrate scaling expansion.

6. Application Framework

Metrics offer developers valuable data, but an APM metric provides key insight that allows them to monitor many different things like transaction volume, web page response times, webpage request queues and data logging collection.

7. Application Metric Customization

Without a doubt, out-of-the-box application performance monitoring metrics provide you with standard tools to oversee IT infrastructures. That said, you need an APM metric customization capabilities so that your DevOps team can create monitoring metrics based on the need of your IT infrastructure or business functions.

8. Data Logging and Storage

Regardless of what occurs, it is the data logs that tell the story, which is why DevOps teams will send for them when a problem occurs. Logged data is the single most important component after an application deployment occurs since an APM also includes a log management solution that identifies issues as they take place. If an APM does not offer this feature, it lacks a fundamental element you need.

9. Error Identification Capabilities

The quickest way to damage your business’s reputation is by waiting until you receive multiple end-user complaints. Developers take pride in ensuring that websites or IT infrastructures work like clockwork. Like errors occur, they want to be the ones to discover them to prevent end-user complaints. An error identification feature will ensure you have the tools necessary to discover any issues that reduce overall system health. If users are not satisfied, they will find a competitor to fulfill needs, which reduces revenue.

An excellent application performance monitoring or management software system will not only provide monitoring tools but the alert, error tracking, reporting and logging features that your business needs to succeed. It is also of vital importance when developing applications so that you test them when creating and oversee their deployment and production to identify issues as soon as they occur. A DevOps team overcomes challenges with the right APM software.