Performance Monitoring at Scale

For most businesses, applications play a vital role, and with performance issues having the power to make or break an app's success, application performance monitoring has become a core focus for developers. Maintaining a flawless experience by keeping things clean and functional on the backend might sound simple on paper, but with today's applications growing increasingly more complex, it takes advanced tools and dedication to pull it off.

Once you scale up your applications, performance monitoring proves even more difficult. So, let's dive into how organizations achieve performance monitoring at scale along with some key recommendations to help you find success.

The Benefits of Application Performance Monitoring

When implemented correctly, application performance monitoring (APM) offers a long list of benefits.

1. Faster Resolutions and Fewer Issues

With APM in place, an organization is empowered to quickly address issues and restore functionality. It also offers preventative measures, helping businesses avoid downtime and outages in the future.

If you're tracking mean time to resolution (MTTR), like you should be, implementing an APM tool will lead to a great reduction in resolution time.

2. Increased Retention and Revenue

As users rely on your application, partially unavailable services just won't cut it. With increasingly high standards for availability and uptime, the lack of application performance monitoring can put your business in a tough spot.

If your app isn't functioning as it should, 99 percent of the time customers will seek an alternative. With APM, you can improve customer satisfaction and retention, increasing revenue in the process.

3. Enhanced Speed and Agility

In the world of business, latency (slow services) is right up there with downtime. If a service is painfully slow to use or simply inefficient, your customers aren't going to be happy.

With application performance monitoring, your business is able to define acceptable ranges and pinpoint the cause of latency throughout the app.

Improved speed means better agility, which is synonymous with competitiveness. The addition of APM tools will help your company gain an edge and keep it sharp.

4. Better All-Around User Experience

It's a given that your APM tool should help you check off key boxes, like speed and uptime requirements, but what else can it do for your organization?

Ultimately, the right APM tool can help you reshape your user experience by raising the bar. An application that responds quickly, almost instantly, is going to please customers, but that's just the start.

With APM, you're going to run into fewer problems that lead to downtime or outages, allowing you to make and keep promises regarding the performance, reliability, and availability of your services.

5. Reduced Operating Costs

An application that isn't being monitored is going to fail at some point, and that failure can be catastrophic. Without warning and without a tool to pinpoint the source of the problem, the failure will cost your DevOps team precious time and money.

That puts DevOps under pressure to get things up and running again, but they'll still lack insight into what they can do to prevent a future outage.

Downtime costs money in the form of DevOps resources and lost customers. The right APM tool will streamline prevention and recovery tactics, allowing you to save on IT staffing costs.

Achieving APM at Scale Using Automation

Manually tracking the performance of an application would be resource-intensive and complex, which is why IT teams turn to automated APM tools, which unlock insights into performance and related problems.

Not only will an APM tool identify issues and bring them to your attention, but it will also show you where the issue is originating within the underlying infrastructure.

As an example, you might have an application with a large number of users, and those users may begin dealing with latency issues. You're also seeing lower throughput in your e-commerce plugin.

Either issue might be found in some other way, but without an APM tool to pinpoint the issues and their source, they get lost in the noise — at least, until they create big problems (like complaints, reputation damage, and eventual abandonment).

APM tools shine because they dig into the details for you, revealing performance problems that are directly impacting your end-users.

Meanwhile, a traditional monitoring technology might tell you about these problems, but it can't tell you why they're happening.

The lack of information available with traditional monitoring tools is their biggest downside. Modern APM tools will help you discover anomalies and quickly get on the path to resolving them.

Ultimately, application performance monitoring goes beyond having some metrics in a dashboard. The goal of APM is to define specific performance goals and ensure that your app is always within the acceptable range.

To help you achieve that, APM tools offer discovery, mapping, observability, root cause analysis, impact analysis, business KPIs, user journey analysis, service monitoring, and container monitoring.

Top 5 APM Tools

The leading APM tools include the following:

• Loupe: Trace events and performance metrics to quickly find the root cause of problems and resolve them fast.
• New Relic: Reveal insights by digging into a variety of metrics, including transactions and clickstreams.
• AppDynamics: Unlock intelligent monitoring, mapping, and profiling tools to understand how various components are interacting in your tech stack.
• Datadog: Subscribe to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize all your business applications with sleek, intuitive tools.
• Dynatrace: Correlate infrastructure health to user experience issues in real time, helping you prioritize and solve problems before they grow.

Bottom line

As we said in the beginning, in order to be able to maintain a flawless experience, extra efforts, and dedication, as well as advanced tools, are needed to pull it off successfully.

If you need help finding the right performance monitoring solution for your organization, Adservio's team of experts can help you navigate.

Contact us today for more information about how we can help your company align with its performance goals and implement APM at scale.