With varying definitions of the term, different vendors use various contexts to define Application Performance Management tools and answer the What is APM question, :
This is ideal only for infrastructure monitoring. These application performance management solutions can collect the metrics of your applications (eg: response times) and servers (eg:CPU, Memory and Disk Space) and alert you when the values cross configured thresholds. However, they cannot diagnose the root cause and or do code profiling to detect problems with application efficiency.
This is what is referred to as application performance monitoring in contemporary terms. This involves capturing traces of different transactions and isolating problematic statements in code. Lately, this has evolved to include synthetic transaction monitoring where businesses can measure the digital experience of end users when accessed from anywhere across the globe.
Old fashioned way of measuring application uptime by analysing the network traffic and connectivity to understand availability status of applications.
To understand application performance management and to decide whether you need to implement it for monitoring the key applications and IT infrastructure of your business, you should evaluate whether your choice of application performance management service covers the following aspects or at least most of it.
This should also be a built-in feature by default. Usually requires an agent to collect real time data and isolate slow transactions and SQL statements. These capabilities enable your application developers to identify and resolve application code level issues and to continuously improve application performance and availability. If your organization has adopted a DevOps methodology, your DevOps engineers should be able to correlate application performance to code commits and builds.
CDeep insights into application performance:heck the flexibility of languages supported. Most application performance monitoring tools support Java and Dot Net but if you need to monitor applications built on other platforms such as php, node.js, etc., check the capabilities of the solution you are evaluating.
Although not a fundamental requirement of application performance management tools, this has slowly been incorporated into most APM tools as an extension of application performance monitoring. Simulated user interactions and subsequent insights regarding response time, DNS load time, network latency, etc. from across geographies helps identify and troubleshoot problems before end users face them, thereby offering a seamless digital experience with your website or web application. These capabilities will help you to isolate region specific issues and respond to user complaints quickly.
This is better understood by the term server monitoring. This covers the At least the fundamental parameters such as CPU, Memory and Disk utilization of servers and VMs. If the solution supports dependency mapping of the infrastructure elements, it is a huge plus.
This is a basic requirement in any tool that claims to be an application performance management software. Discovering the elements in your IT network, segregating them based on types (servers, databases, VMs, etc.) and adding them within the console should be automated to save loads of time.
Most application performance management tools offer performance reports. However, look out for capacity planning reports. These reports offer useful insights regarding historical usage and growth trends and help plan upgrades to your infrastructure or redistribute load with more clarity.
Considering that any business organization might have multiple touchpoints to monitor in an IT setup such as servers, VMs, Web apps, Cloud services, in-house applications, ERP, Network performance, bandwidth, etc. your application performance management software should be able to integrate with other tools for easy collection and correlation of data.
In case your business has a minimum of 25 components to manage, inclusive of servers, VMs and hosted applications such as application servers, databases, web applications, etc. it is fairly important that you implement a comprehensive app performance management tool. This will help monitor performance issues with applications, keep track of the health and availability of servers, and plan capacity based on incoming requests. Since the diagnosis and identification of issues is faster, troubleshooting is faster which otherwise would cost you valuable business hours and important leads. Also, check the price of the solution you are exploring. The product should be scalable and the price should be reasonable for the features offered.
Most enterprise application performance management tools are able to deliver the functionalities discussed in this page, however you should carefully evaluate a few tools to conclude what suits your requirements best. If you are looking for an application performance management system that can offer comprehensive insights like we discussed above, you should try out ManageEngine Applications Manager. It offers detailed monitoring for over 130 IT applications from servers, databases, VMs, cloud services, application performance to user experience monitoring - from a single console. You can download the free 30-day trial ( with complete capabilities) of the product and start evaluating to see how it fits your needs.
The abbreviation APM has two common expansions - Application Performance Management and Application Performance Monitoring. The two terms have been used interchangeably so much so that they have come to mean the same thing. However, traditionally Application Performance Management is referred to the practice of managing every aspect of your IT ecosystem from infrastructure, applications, network, and user experience. Application Performance Management (APM) gives IT admins the ability to make configuration changes to actual applications against simply monitoring application code and performance attributes.
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