As applications themselves increase in complexity and Big Data becomes the rule (not the exception), organizations are turning to Application Performance Monitoring (APMC) tools and services. That's because they need to monitor the performance, availability, and user experience of their software solutions.
A Gartner predicted that APMC frameworks would monitor 20% of all business applications by the year 2021. And according to Intricately, there are at least 400 companies worldwide that should implement this strategy.
Now, what is Application Performance Monitoring? Why is the acquisition of APMC solutions and services on the rise?
These questions are answered throughout this article. Keep reading to understand!
What is Application Performance Monitoring?
At its core, application performance monitoring is all about understanding the 'why' as quickly as possible. When it comes to monitoring application performance, speed and proactivity are essential.
Why is your app running fast or slow, or why is an end user encountering a specific issue? A proactive APMC strategy is the answer.
Without an APMC tool, many organizations will find themselves in a position to be reactive to issues as they arise.
While this might be manageable at first, it is rarely scalable, and the ultra-competitive landscape for software often makes such reactive solutions impractical.
Let's take a look at the three types of APMC tools, according to stackify:
- Based on application metrics — Some tools use server and application metrics and include themselves in APM. They communicate how many requests your app is receiving, which apps are slow, but not why they are slow.
- Based on code-level performance — these tools focus on code profiling and transaction tracking, therefore more along the lines of your “typical” type of APMC solution.
- network based — some tools measure the performance of an application based on its network traffic.
What kind of companies is an Application Performance Monitoring strategy for?
Basically, two types of organizations should seriously consider structuring an Application Performance Monitoring strategy. See what they are in the topics that follow!
1. Companies that consume corporate infrastructure, such as AWS solutions
As more businesses move to serverless computing services, one goal remains paramount: the level of service offered to application end users must be maintained (or even improved) to meet ever-increasing customer expectations.
So even if these companies choose to use cloud-based options like AWS, the end user should not encounter any changes to the service.
These companies need APMC to ensure their cloud footprint is helping the user experience (not actively hurting).
2. Companies with medium to large overall cloud spend
On the subject of cloud solutions, any company with medium to large overall cloud spend should implement APMC solutions and services to leverage all the data available to their developer teams.
If cloud solutions represent a significant expense for the organization, APMC tools will help ensure a solid understanding of code performance, transaction times, application dependencies, and end-user experience.
→ Although these two company profiles indicate the need for APMC, in reality any company that has some infrastructure has APMC in place in some way.
Ultimately, it all comes down to application behavior. Every company has unique applications and therefore unique behaviors.
Application performance monitoring's job is to provide visibility into application behavior — a critical tool for small, medium, and large companies across a wide range of industries.
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