Whether you’ve built a smartphone app, online video game or software, you should consider using application performance monitoring tools to keep your system running smoothly and your users happy. Any issue, whether it’s from a third-party network or your own team of developers, can slow down your application and cost you users—and money.
It’s smart business to make sure you’re doing everything you can to keep your customers happy, and a fast and consistent application is required for that. APM (application performance monitoring) tools can help you with that.
What are APM tools
So, what exactly are APM tools? Essentially APM tools will collect and monitor all the data involved in your application. This helps guide your developers so they know immediately if there are issues and where.
Some of the things that your APM tools can monitor include:
- performance and usage of databases, web services and other things your application depends on
- performance of individual web requests
- server metrics like memory and CPU
- application framework metrics
- real user monitoring
- custom application metrics made in-house
- log data and errors
The way you use your APM tool in your business is important. You might find it’s the technical side you’re more interested in, like the app performance, or how to best utilize the data metrics that you find from using APM.
How do APM tools work
The kiss of death for any application, game or website, is slow response time. Ensuring your application is up and running isn’t good enough—you need to make sure it’s running fast enough and meeting your users’ needs. APM tools will not only monitor your system but also use your team alerts when things are going wrong, like a functionality breaks or your server is running slower than normal.
According to the Gartner research firm, APM should typically work through these five steps:
- First, it will detect when the user experiences a problem using the application. This is known as end-user experience monitoring.
- It will survey the runtime of your application and try to see if there’s a problem.
- User transactions will be examined to try to pinpoint the source of the problem.
- Based on what the tools have found in the first three steps, it will then begin to deep-dive into where the problem is likely to be.
- Finally, there is the analytics that will both show where the specific problem is, so your dev team doesn’t have to comb through the mountain of data from the first three steps, and then you can both correct the problem and prepare for similar issues in the future.
How do I use an APM tool
APM tools can be very user-friendly and help throughout the entire process of deployment and production of your application. It can help in development, testing, and operations.
Just about every team working on your application can be aided by APM tools:
- Developers can use APM for troubleshooting the code, monitoring project progress and collaborating with other teams.
- Testers can increase their accuracy by identifying issues more quickly and conduct load testing.
- Ops can use APM for synthetic testing across all platforms (web, mobile, and desktop) to ensure a quality user experience
- Business leaders can manage analytics and ensure there are no issues that will affect revenue.
How do I find the best one
Different APM tools will suit different business needs. Finding the Best Application Performance Monitoring Tools means addressing whether your business needs an all-around experience or one that focuses on one specific need above all others, like security. Whichever APM tool you end up using, just know you’re taking the right step for your business.
