APM – the heart of any application’s victory
Performance is at the core of any application’s success. As users depend on web applications to fulfill their everyday needs, in the same way, a business’ success now directly depends on the performance of its applications. Hence, application performance monitoring (APM) is vital for any organization to deliver and maintain a top-notch user experience.
In today’s digital business services era, app monitoring tools play an important role for IT teams and application professionals/owners.
So, today we are going to explore an application’s sanctuary.
Sounds interesting? Let’s take a tour then!
APM tools have become crucial to businesses as their technologies deal with increasingly complex apps.
App performance affects user experience and satisfaction directly and plays a significant role in business metrics such as revenue, downloads, retention, and usage.
Speed is everything!
In today’s digital world, speed is everything, majorly for websites and applications used by end-users. However, the slow speed harms business productivity, the image of a brand, and profits. For instance, imagine that you are using some e-commerce application that loads slowly or repeatedly shows some errors. Later, you just might end-up use some other e-commerce applications with more incredible speed and no errors.
This shows that everyone around is running behind speed, and consumers want to experience applications with higher speed and applications that are bug-free/error-free. So, an organization needs to withstand consumers’ needs to be in the race against competitors, or consumers might simply end up switching to another website that could be your competitor.
Whether it is a mobile application, custom web application, packaged enterprise application (SharePoint, SAP, Siebel), or VDI application, ensuring enhanced performance and user experience will result in the application’s success.
Looking at the other side of a mirror, every application owner, IT manager, and the developer has a question, “Why is my application slow?” And it is equally important to finding what the reason behind the slowness of an application is?
This is where monitoring techniques come into the role. Few conventional APM approaches comprise Telnetting to application ports for diagnosis, executing ping tests on applications suspected to be slow, and measuring server-level metrics (memory, CPU, and disk).
It has been observed that about 73% of businesses experience loss in productivity due to the application’s performance slowdown. Also, a one-second delay in website loading time could result in approximately a 16% decrease in consumer satisfaction.
What is application performance monitoring (APM)?
APM is a practice and strategy of continuously tracking and monitoring business applications and end-user experience as they use applications to isolate anomalies, understand trends, and find solutions for problems and code optimization.
Following APM strategies will help you survive 2021
- Digital user experience monitoring – tracks times when end-user experience errors and slowness while exploring applications.
- Business transaction profiling – identifies where slowness is exactly being caused and root cause for application problems.
- Application code-level diagnostics – recognize issues in the application code.
- Application deep-dive analytics – deeply analyzes the application infrastructure.
- Infrastructure visibility – monitors the health and availability of the supporting infrastructure to ensure application performance success.
As per Dimensional Research, about 49% of users expect apps to start within two seconds or less, and approximately 80% of users will give up to three chances before uninstalling it.
What are APM tools?
App monitoring tools are the components that include complete application performance management solutions, i.e., managing, monitoring, and staying on top of application performance. In short, it helps quickly evaluate and diagnose various issues that are related to how an app is performing.
APM tools are designed to monitor the end-user experience precisely. This comprises metrics such as how fast the application starts and how long it takes requests to execute.
APM monitors both application’s technical performance and its perceived performance by the users. There are many monitoring tools that help enterprises to be competitive in the industry. The three unique monitoring tools are artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, business-impact analytics, and end-user monitoring.
As per Gartner, APM tools could be defined as software that meets three primary criteria:
- Frontend monitoring
- Application diagnostics, discovery, and tracing
- Analytics
First things first – how to select APM tools
The first step is recognizing the correct tools, i.e., to identify stakeholders and their critical pains.
Here we go…..
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools to survive 2021
- Application metrics-based APM tools – these APM solutions majorly collect various app and server related metrics. Further, the APM tool uses metrics data to determine which of your application’s URL requests are slow.
- Network-based APM tools – these tools concentrate on network traffic to measure application performance and create a novel product group called Network Performance Monitoring.
- Code profiling-based APM tools – these tools perform code profiling and transaction tracing, which helps determine the exact cause of performance issues. Several well-known APM tools use domain-specific AI and machine learning (ML) techniques to profile several code types.
Few examples of APM tools
Instabug’s APM tool
This tool is specifically designed for mobile teams to be able to –
- Effectively balance between performance advancements and feature development.
- Decipher ambiguous consumer grievances regarding app bugs, speed, and loading.
- Proactively discover problems that affect your users when your app runs in the wild.
Also, the mobile APM tool will help you by recognizing things such as slow network calls, slow screen transitions, and UI (user interface) hangs that negatively affect your end-user experience.
Raygun
It focuses on performance issues, errors, and crashes that users encounter. Its smart error grouping feature saves most time by collecting errors underneath a single root cause without flooding your inbox with notifications.
Real User Monitoring (RUM) tool – Pingdom
These tools are essential for recognizing performance issues and their environments. Pingdom monitors your website for downtime and alerts you when a disaster happens.
Kinsta APM tool
A superhero tool that will help you run a faster and stronger site. Kinsta APM tool helps you find performance issues on your WordPress site.
Final words – why APM tools are necessary to survive 2021?
To be competitive in the market and enhance the user experience by improving the app’s performance, APM tools will help you take a proactive approach toward enhancing quality. Moreover, keeping your apps running as fast as possible using the best APM tools will help you survive 2021.
The most acceptable way to utilize APM is not to work backward and fix issues that arise late. Instead, you will be working forward to monitor and continuously enhance your app’s performance frequently.
Most importantly, APM tools can help you sleep at night by proactively keeping an eye on your applications’ performance round the clock. They are also there when you need them to fix bugs quickly.
For more such content, download our latest whitepapers on app management solutions.
