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What is APM

What is APM?

Application performance management (APM) is an important process that involves monitoring, measuring, and optimizing application performance to ensure desired service quality and user satisfaction. This involves constant tracking of applications for their performance as well as effectively addressing any issues that may arise for enhanced business operations.

The APM acronym also stands for application performance monitoring, which again is a part of application performance management. While application performance monitoring focuses on proactive monitoring and detecting performance issues, application performance management takes a more comprehensive approach to managing and optimizing an application's performance from start to finish to achieve successful business results. In short, monitoring is a subset of management when it comes to tracking application performance.


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Core components of APM

To effectively manage application performance, it is crucial to have a comprehensive view of your application's performance from start to finish. This means monitoring and analyzing every aspect of the application, from the user interface to the backend infrastructure. By having a holistic understanding of your application's performance, you can identify and address any issues that may arise, optimize performance, and ultimately provide a better experience for your users. Here are some of the core components involved in APM:

Business transaction monitoring

Evaluating the efficiency of your application is crucial for optimizing its performance and enhancing business operations. Post application development and deployment, continuous performance monitoring is necessary to swiftly detect and address any issues that may arise. Real-time information about the application's internal functioning can significantly improve the precision of business outcomes. Tracking individual transactions, database calls, thread profiles, and error reports can help identify and fix any slowdowns. Analyzing the connections between various application components with the help of automated service maps can also greatly facilitate problem-solving and issue resolution before they impact business operations.

What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager

Infrastructure monitoring

Many companies use a variety of systems to support their applications, such as servers, databases, networks, application servers, and more. As businesses embrace the onset of cloud and latest technology platforms, infrastructure monitoring now encompasses a collection of virtualized environments, cloud infrastructure, microservices, and containers. Gaining deep understanding of the workings of these components helps ensure the application's performance needs are met and problems can be identified and resolved promptly, leading to improved performance, capacity planning, and cost control.

What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager

End-user experience monitoring

Ensuring a positive user experience is essential for business application success. Monitoring the frontend, alongside understanding the backend, ensures a seamless experience. Neglecting the frontend can lead to frustrated users, lower satisfaction, and reduced retention. By monitoring a web application's real user experience and back-end performance (by simulating user actions, tracking page URLs, monitoring APIs, etc.), businesses can gain real-time insights into user engagement from various locations, improve customer loyalty, reduce costs, and increase revenue.

What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager
What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager

Automatic discovery and mapping of dependencies

In a fast-changing business environment, efficient application performance management requires understanding the interdependencies between infrastructure elements. This involves gaining a comprehensive view of how resources and infrastructure elements are interconnected within an application. By consistently discovering applications, creating dependency maps, and updating them with newly-discovered resources, organizations can ensure a seamless user experience by proactively identifying and resolving potential issues before they escalate, minimizing downtime.

What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager
What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager

AI-powered real-time alerts

Obtaining real-time alerts is a crucial requirement of APM to detect performance issues and application downtime. These alerts should have configurable thresholds for individual metrics and the overall application at the granular level. Receiving notifications via multiple channels such as email, SMS, Slack messages, along with ITSM tool integrations like ServiceNow, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus enables admins for quick issue troubleshooting. Additionally, they should have the ability to perform pre-configured, automated actions like running scripts, restarting virtual machines, or executing MBean operations, which can facilitate faster troubleshooting and resolution of any issues that may arise.

What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager

Application analytics and dashboards

Obtaining in-depth performance analytics of your application infrastructure is crucial to enable you to track and measure the performance of your applications over time. While monitoring your entire application stack can help you a lot in performance tracking, gaining deep insights into how your application is performing with respect to different application components can provide a complete understanding on how your application infrastructure is actually performing, especially when your application operates in a hybrid or microservices architecture. This can help you identify potential areas of improvement, forecast application performance, and detect complex issues right on time.

What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager
What is APM - ManageEngine Applications Manager

APM vs Observability

At first glance, APM and observability may seem alike since they both involve gathering data from multiple sources and offering performance insights. However, APM focuses primarily on debugging of applications, whereas observability delivers an understanding of applications.

APM monitors what is happening within a specific application and its backend system calls, but lacks the broader context of the entire system. Observability provides a broader context and understanding of how different components and services interact. In addition, observability provides a comprehensive understanding of the technical elements impacting application performance. By analyzing and correlating logs, metrics, and traces, it identifies the underlying cause of performance issues and helps troubleshoot complex problems in dynamic system environments.

Why Applications Manager for APM?

ManageEngine Applications Manager serves as the robust tool for monitoring your business infrastructure by providing the following capabilities:

  • Application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, and digital experience monitoring (DEM) from a single console. No need to integrate community scripts or plugins.
  • Agentless monitoring for 150+ enterprise technologies such as servers, databases, application servers, web servers, middleware, VMs, containers, etc., both cloud native and on-premise.
  • Supports multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
  • Monitors container technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift.
  • Distributed monitoring architecture to help scale as per business needs.
  • AI-powered automatic root cause analysis and anomaly detection.
  • Customizable dashboards
  • Affordable pricing plans starting at just USD 395/year. Perpetual license available.

More on APM

What is the purpose of an APM solution?

 

An APM solution offers valuable insights into application performance, empowering IT and DevOps administrators to effectively manage the availability, performance, and end-user interactions. By swiftly pinpointing any potential problems, APM tools effectively minimize downtime, resulting in a smooth and efficient software experience for end-users.

What does APM stand for?

 

APM has two expansions and they are:

  • Applications performance management
  • Applications performance monitoring
Applications performance monitoring is specific to monitoring various metrics and instances of an application, whereas application performance management is managing the application's performance on the whole and developing strategies.

Why is APM important?

 

As technology advances and customer expectations grow, businesses are adopting microservices and cloud-native architectures to enhance application performance and stay competitive. This approach involves building application components as microservices and using distributed infrastructure like containers, VMs, serverless, or cloud applications. This allows for independent scaling and reduces the impact of technology interruptions on daily business activities, revenue, and brand reputation.

To ensure high performance for applications, it's crucial to have deep visibility into their components, from the frontend to the backend. This real-time observability helps in identifying and addressing issues before they impact end-users, providing a seamless digital experience. Since modern applications have a complex and dynamic structure, APM is crucial to keep your applications running and functioning at their best. It is critical since applications typically represent the brand. Without an APM tool, it might be strenuous to locate issues and resolve them which rises the likelihood of a poor end user experience. It can also reduce operational costs, and increase revenue and sales.

What are the challenges in APM?

 

Following are some of the challenges observed in APM:

  • Complexity of IT infrastructure: Keeping track of the various components that influence your application's performance can prove to be quite challenging, particularly if your infrastructure incorporates a hybrid or microservices framework.
  • Multiple metrics: Application performance management encompasses a vast realm of IT infrastructure, encompassing various metrics that require constant monitoring.
  • Distribution of data: Managing and evaluating performance data from various sources can be a daunting task, particularly when working with a complex infrastructure of hybrid or microservices applications.
  • Performance blind spots: When deploying hybrid and microservice applications, coordinating performance management steps between on-premises servers and public cloud services can cause gaps, leading to unnoticed problems.
  • Lack of skillset: Effective management and analysis of performance data calls for the expertise of a skilled individual. Without this, creating a successful application performance management strategy can prove to be a daunting task.
  • High cost: Utilizing a proficient application performance management system can often come at a high cost and may increase your overall expenses whenever your application infrastructure needs to be expanded.

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