Application performance management (APM) has become a business-critical discipline for IT leaders charged with delivering seamless digital experiences. With consumers and employees alike intolerant of slow or unstable apps, APM is essential for detecting issues before customers are impacted, rapidly troubleshooting problems, and continuously optimizing systems.
This comprehensive guide will explore what APM encompasses, its capabilities, why it’s an indispensable technology today, actionable best practices for implementation, leading solutions, and steps to get started.
What is APM and How Does it Work?
APM refers to the monitoring and management of application performance and availability. Its overarching goal is to:
- Proactively detect performance problems and anomalies before users are impacted
- Empower rapid troubleshooting and root cause analysis when issues do arise
- Provide insights to continuously optimize applications and infrastructure
APM solutions aim to offer comprehensive visibility into the end-to-end health and experience of critical business applications. They work by continuously collecting performance metrics, events, and traces from across the application environment, analyzing this data, and triggering alerts when anomalous patterns emerge.
APM dashboard providing real-time visibility into application health (AppDynamics)
Core capabilities provided by APM solutions include:
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Real user monitoring (RUM) – Captures performance data like page load times, errors, and satisfaction from an end-user perspective.
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Backend monitoring – Code-level instrumentation monitors backend transactions, throughput, errors, and system metrics.
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Application topology mapping – Automatically discovers and maps dependencies between components and services.
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Anomaly detection – Statistical algorithms automatically detect deviations from normal patterns.
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Alerting – Proactively notifies appropriate teams through actionable alerts when warning thresholds are exceeded.
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Root cause analysis – Links cause and effect across components to pinpoint sources of problems.
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Analytics – Enables analysis of trends, outliers, and KPIs to provide performance insights.
By leveraging these capabilities, APM solutions offer comprehensive observability into application health for both troubleshooting and optimization.
The Critical Role of APM in 2024
Several key technology and business trends are accelerating APM adoption across enterprises:
Microservices and Distributed Systems
Monolithic applications are being broken down into independently deployable microservices and distributed architectures. While this enables faster feature delivery, it also introduces complexity in tracing transactions and user journeys across dynamic service meshes.
APM provides indispensable visibility into the performance and availability of microservices-based systems. adoption. Top APM solutions offer robust distributed tracing, topology mapping, and log correlation to pinpoint issues across cloud-native environments.
Cloud Migration
The acceleration of cloud adoption, especially among regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, increases the need for cloud-based APM. Serverless architectures and auto-scaling also introduce fluidity and constant change that demands more sophisticated monitoring versus static on-prem resources.
Cloud APM enables continuous visibility and optimization across public cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. AIOps-enhanced APM can also automate remediation actions in response to alerts.
Digital Transformation
As businesses become increasingly reliant on software and digital experiences to serve customers, engage employees, and differentiate themselves, application performance becomes linked directly to revenue, reputation, and competitiveness.
Recent research by Akamai found:
- 57% of consumers will abandon a website after just 3 seconds of load delay
- 52% now have higher expectations for web and mobile performance than a year ago
High-performing digital experiences are no longer a nice-to-have but a need-to-have. APM enables businesses to deliver consistency and excellence across digital touchpoints.
DevOps and Continuous Delivery
The widespread adoption of DevOps, test automation, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code reinforces the need for robust APM. Frequent deployments and changes inherent to DevOps increase the risk of inadvertently introducing performance regressions or issues.
APM provides the crucial feedback loop and guardrails to identify regressions early before impacting customers. Shifting security and performance testing left in the pipeline requires holistic application visibility.
The convergence of these trends means application performance management is now indispensable for IT leaders. IDC predicts global APM spend will exceed $14 billion by 2025 as usage expands.
Actionable Best Practices for Leveraging APM
While APM solutions provide robust technology capabilities, businesses must also employ the right processes and practices to maximize value. Following are key best practices modern enterprises should incorporate into their APM strategies:
Instrument Critical User Journeys
The best practice is to focus monitoring on business priorities – the key user journeys, transactions, and operations tied directly to revenue, reputation, and KPIs. Attempting comprehensive monitoring across all apps creates unnecessary noise and overhead.
Target instrumentation to where it matters most based on business impact. For example, ensuring smooth checkout and preventing cart abandonment are crucial for e-commerce. Prioritizing customer-impacting versus internal journeys enables better focus.
Prioritize End-User Experience Monitoring
While backend telemetry offers crucial system-level visibility, real user monitoring (RUM) provides indispensable insights into exactly how customers experience your digital touchpoints. RUM identifies front-end performance issues that directly impact user satisfaction, conversions, and other KPIs.
APM coverage should encompass the full stack from frontend to backend. RUM paired with backend tracing provides end-to-end visibility across all tiers of critical apps.
Implement Intelligent Alerting
Configured properly, smart alerting minimizes false positives and notification fatigue. Set thresholds and triggers based on dynamic baselines and anomaly detection versus static limits. Leverage AIOps capabilities where possible to automatically tune alerts.
Ensure notifications provide actionable context into where to start troubleshooting. Alerts empower rapid incident response by pointing engineers to the highest probability root causes first.
Promote Proactive Monitoring
While troubleshooting production issues is important, the significant value of APM comes from continuous optimization. Analyzing trends, emerging outliers, and chronic issues allows fine-tuning applications and infrastructure to address problems proactively before they cause customer-impacting outages.
Promote a culture that leverages APM insights to continuously improve performance and availability rather than just reacting to crises. Provide development teams access to APM dashboards and visibility to empower optimization.
Maintain Focus on Optimization and Adoption
The application landscape is constantly evolving. As your environment changes and new APM capabilities emerge, continuously refine instrumentation, analytics, dashboards, and alerts to maintain optimal visibility and value. Promote internal adoption by proving value and tailoring dashboards to different personas like developers, ops engineers, and business managers.
Getting maximum ROI from APM requires both technological capabilities and cultural alignment to leverage APM for continuous improvement.
Critical APM Capabilities for Digital Operations
Modern APM solutions incorporate sophisticated technology spanning analytics, machine learning, and automation. Here are some of the core capabilities to evaluate when assessing solutions:
Distributed tracing and topology visualization – With microservices architectures, following the path of a request across dynamic service meshes becomes critical but complex. Distributed tracing correlated with auto-discovered topology maps makes troubleshooting seamless.
Code-level instrumentation – The deepest application insights require embedded instrumentation at the code level versus just external monitoring. Language-specific tracing libraries enable precision monitoring customized to your tech stack.
Synthetic monitoring – While real user data is ideal, scheduled synthetic scripts emulating user journeys across critical funnels provide crucial 24/7 visibility between real user activity. Synthetic monitoring is an essential complement to RUM.
Anomaly detection – Statistical algorithms and machine learning automatically detect deviations from normal patterns to surface abnormal performance or errors requiring investigation. Reduces reliance on static thresholds.
Workflow automation integration – Integration with workflow automation platforms like ServiceNow allows seamlessly raising tickets and remediation workflows in response to APM alerts.
Mobile app monitoring – Specialized SDKs extend APM visibility to mobile apps in addition to web applications to provide a comprehensive view across channels.
Business analytics integration – Integration with BI tools allows correlating application telemetry with business KPIs to quantify performance impact. Directly ties app experience to financials.
Evaluating capabilities that align to your tech stack and use cases ensures optimal visibility and utility from APM investments.
Critical Components of an APM Strategy
While the capabilities above focus on technical functionality, businesses must also consider people, processes, and partnerships when formulating an enterprise APM strategy. Key elements to factor in include:
Skills development – Ensure engineers are trained on leveraging APM tooling and dashboards for troubleshooting, optimization, and root cause analysis. Learning around new capabilities should be continuous.
Collaboration – Foster collaboration between app developers, ops engineers, support teams, and business owners to collectively uncover performance insights and continuously improve apps.
Customer-centric culture – Instill a culture focused on delivering seamless customer experiences across the app lifecycle from development to ops. APM plays a crucial role in realizing this goal.
Platform consolidation – Limit tool sprawl by consolidating on a core APM platform versus using disjointed tools. Unified data provides richer correlations.
Security and compliance – Evaluate solutions for capabilities like data encryption, access controls, and compliance support if monitoring regulated workloads.
Financial management – Cloud-based APM can help optimize cloud costs but also introduces variable spending. Monitor efficiency and right-size investments.
The right people, processes, and culture complement the technology in driving maximum APM ROI.
The surging importance of APM has led to a crowded and complex vendor landscape encompassing:
Pure-play APM vendors – Examples include Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and Splunk. Offer platform-specific APM capabilities.
Cloud providers – APM integrated into AWS, Azure, and GCP for monitoring cloud workloads.
Observability platforms – Broader platforms like Elastic and Grafana offering APM-related capabilities like tracing.
Open source – OpenTelemetry provides open source distributed tracing instrumentation and SDKs.
When evaluating providers, focus on capabilities that align to your technical environment and use cases. Also examine:
- Breadth of platform coverage – Support for all applications and infrastructure in your environment.
- Ease of instrumentation – How much configuration is required to enable monitoring for apps.
- Data ingestion costs – Potential egress and retention charges, especially for cloud APM.
- Interoperability – Integration with complementary tools you leverage like SIEMs and collaboration platforms.
- Analyst recognition – Look for leadership in Gartner, Forrester, and other analyst reports.
Balancing these factors will allow selecting the ideal APM solution(s) for your needs and environment.
Getting Started With APM
Evolving APM from a nice-to-have to a mission-critical operational discipline requires an incremental approach focused on driving value and adoption.
Here are recommended steps for getting started:
Instrument critical apps first – Start by targeting 2-3 business-critical applications like e-commerce and self-service portals to focus visibility where it matters most.
Create performance baselines – Analyze performance patterns over 2-4 weeks to establish normal thresholds for critical metrics. This enables configuring alerts to surface true anomalies.
Prioritize developer dashboards – Provide development teams access to tailored APM dashboards and tooling to empower app optimization versus just troubleshooting.
Promote early wins – Socialize major outages prevented or optimizations driven through APM to demonstrate value. Build internal support at both senior and technical levels.
Scale monitoring maturity – Once value is proven, gradually expand instrumentation to cover more apps and infrastructure. But maintain focus on critical journeys.
Keep pace with change – Continuously evolve dashboards, alerts, data integration, and capabilities as new use cases emerge. APM must align to changing priorities.
With the right strategy combining technology, process, and culture, APM can transform application visibility and performance. Prioritizing business-critical apps will provide the most immediate value. Reach out for help formulating an APM approach tailored to your specific environment and objectives.
