Applications have become the lifeline of digital businesses today. From banking to retail to logistics – companies across domains rely on applications to acquire, engage and retain customers while ensuring efficient business operations. Global application usage is expected to grow by 5X in the next 5 years as per IDC. By 2025, over 500 billion applications instances are forecast to be created to power digital experiences.
However, with mounting application usage comes greater vulnerability to performance issues and outages which negatively impact customer experience. 40% of users will abandon apps and services if they underperform as per Google research. At the same time, application downtimes can cost companies over $200,000 an hour as per Aberdeen Group.
This is where application performance management (APM) comes in. APM tools monitor applications in real-time to provide actionable performance metrics, help troubleshoot emerging issues quicker and improve overall stability and uptime. They play a key role in driving SUPERIOR digital experiences.
While the market has been historically dominated by commercial vendors like NewRelic, Dynatrace etc. there has been rising adoption of open source APM tools in recent years by leading companies. Open source provides a great way to get started with application monitoring WITHOUT significant upfront investment. Let‘s compare some of the factors between open source and commercial APM tools:
||Open Source APM|Commercial APM|
|-|————- |:————-:|
|Cost|Free to use (some paid enterprise versions available)|Expensive license fees |
|Ease of Use|Typically requires more effort for implementation and maintenance|Generally simpler to implement, includes technical support|
|Features|Advanced capabilities though less out-of-the-box dashboards/reporting |Packaged solutions with modules for different components |
|Scalability|Scales well but requires expertise to handle large environments |Enterprise-grade scalability with vendor support|
|Customizability |Highly customizable to suit specific needs|Less flexible, limited customization options|
|TCO|60-80% lower TCO over 5 years |High TCO with annual licenses|
Leading brands like Netflix, Uber and Spotify use open source APM tools like ELK stack, Pinpoint and AppDynamics. On the other hand Salesforce, IBM rely more on commercial vendors. Over the next sections, we analyze the top open source applications performance monitoring tools:
1. SigNoz
SigNoz is a full-stack open source APM purpose-built for infrastructure based on cloud-native technologies like docker and kubernetes. Key capabilities:
- Distributed tracing and visualization of service maps
- Metrics monitoring
- Alerting based on thresholds
- Language agents for Go, Java, Python etc.
- Integration with OpenTelemetry for instrumentation data
Architecture
SigNoz follows a microservices approach with components for API server, UI, storage etc. This makes it highly scalable and resilient.
Technology
SigNoz leverages React, Golang, ClickHouse and Jaeger. It can run easily on Kubernetes and serverless platforms.
2. Apache SkyWalking
SkyWalking provides observability capabilities over complex modern distributed architectures involving cloud infrastructure, containers, microservices and service meshes.
Features
- Auto application topology mapping
- Distributed tracing powered by otel
- Customizable dashboards
- Multiple language agents
- Powerful query capabilities
SkyWalking is used by over 1200+ companies globally and is Cloud Native Computing Foundation member project.
Underlying Technology
Core components are written Java and it uses ElasticSearch or other storage backends.
3. Metrics
Metrics is a popular library for instrumenting code to track key application metrics.
Features
- Lightweight instrumentation of libraries
- Health metrics via health checks
- Powerful metric reporting sink integrations
- Easy embedding in Java based apps
- Backends support for Graphite etc.
Leading companies like Amazon, Yelp and Spotify use Metrics library for application monitoring.
Architecture
Metrics provides a façade api over metrics backends like Graphite with a highly efficient in-memory structure.
