Do you rely on cloud-hosted apps to run major parts of your business? Application performance management (APM) should be essential to your technology stack. Keep reading to understand why and explore top solutions.
What is Cloud APM and Why It‘s Crucial
Cloud APM gives you visibility into the availability, speed, errors, and overall health of cloud-based applications. Specialized for monitoring cloud-native apps, APM solutions deliver:
Real-time tracking: Continuously monitor response times, traffic volumes, uptime metrics, and more to detect problems immediately. Leading platforms provide 1-second data granularity.
Automated mapping: See all components of distributed cloud apps and how they interact. APM auto-discovers services and dependencies so you understand impact.
Smart anomaly detection: Machine learning algorithms in APM platforms quickly spot unusual performance deviations and advise you on severity.
Rapid root cause analysis: When slowdowns occur, APM pinpoints culprits among all application elements and cloud services with detailed tracebacks.
Business insights: Correlate technical metrics with key business KPIs to see how tech performance uplifts revenue, conversions, and end-user experience.
According to recent research by EMA, the lack of adequate APM costs medium-large companies an average of $300,000 per year due to lost productivity, revenue declines, and outages.
Bottom line, modern digital experiences demand APM to manage complexity at scale.
Key Benefits Driving APM Adoption
Here are five ways organizations leverage APM capabilities to their advantage:
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Cut issue resolution time: APM analysis accerlates identifying and fixing problems by over 60%. Less downtime!
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Protect revenue streams: By heading off 50% more app incidents, companies minimize revenue losses. Over $250K average annual savings per IDC.
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Boost developer output: With automated app mapping and alerts, focus stays on building vs. manual debugging. 20% lifted productivity per Gartner.
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Streamline cloud usage: APM intelligence assists right-sizing provisioning to curb cloud waste. Businesses save 11% on hosting costs says Dimensional Research.
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Raise customer satisfaction: Smooth user experiences prevent frustration and cart abandonment. For 85% of buyers, good web/mobile UX is essential in brand affinity says Impact.
Now let‘s check out some of the top cloud APM solutions to enable these benefits.
Top Cloud Application Performance Management Solutions
Many robust APM platforms exist for assuring well-tuned cloud applications. Here are eight highly-rated options:
Elastic Observability
Elastic consolidates application performance monitoring, infrastructure metrics, log analytics, and business KPIs into a unified troubleshooting command center. The full-stack analysis speeds isolating root causes among dynamic microservices.
Instana APM
Purpose-built for containerized apps and automation-driven workflows, Instana auto-discovers all components then monitors performance in context of DevOps change velocity. Great for cloud-native optimization.
Google Cloud Operations
GCP‘s integrated APM offering plays to strengths in cloud infrastructure visibility and intelligent analytics. Unparalled for Google Cloud-hosted workloads with 200+ service integrations.
Dynatrace Software Intelligence
Dynatrace sets itself apart with AI determining impact and patterns from cross-correlated metrics. Top honors for simplifying full-stack observability from dynamic Kubernetes pods to end-user experiences.
New Relic One
Boasting 100,000+ customers, New Relic leads in breadth of APM capabilities tightly integrated with cloud profiling, tracing, logging, and alerting. Price/performance balance impresses.
Cisco AppDynamics
AppDynamics utilizes machine learning for anomaly detection and service dependency mapping. Precise code-level diagnostics shine for custom cloud-hosted transactional apps and microservices.
Datadog APM
Datadog‘s end-to-end platform monitors cloud infrastucture, applications, log events, and synthetic user journeys with advanced analytics unifying observability. Slick dashboards for easy collaboration.
Scout APM
Scout fills a niche for dedicated APM affordably priced for high-scale workloads. Its streamlined UX helps developers visualize call stacks, errors, and traces without added latency in production.
When selecting solutions, compare detection lag time, analysis depth, actionable data presentation, solution extensibility, and responsive vendor support.
It‘s Time to Master Cloud Application Performance
Today‘s lightning-speed digital landscape leaves no room for sluggish cloud applications. To stay competitive, companies must master performance management. APMs provide the actionable app intelligence needed to assure speed, availability and stellar customer experiences.
Evaluate options to determine the best visbility and diagnostics for optimizing your cloud investments. With the right APM platform, your team can confidently build innovative services and scale them global knowing performance won‘t falter. The outcomes will speak for themselves in hard business growth.
