In today‘s digitally driven world, web applications are the sensitive underbelly of modern enterprises. From front-end user experiences to complex backend processes, they increasingly power mission-critical business capabilities.
When web apps slow down or crash, businesses bleed money – to the tune of $100,000 an hour according to some studies. Security vulnerabilities also result in devastating breaches, compliance fines and reputation loss.
This makes comprehensive web application monitoring non-negotiable for organizations of all sizes.
But with a maze of tools and approaches available, where do you start? What capabilities suit your environment? How do you extract maximum value?
In this extensive 3000 word guide, I‘ll cover everything you need to know to make the right web application monitoring decisions for your needs.
Why Care About Web Application Monitoring?
Let‘s first better understand what web app monitoring entails and why it matters.
What Does Web Application Monitoring Involve?
Web application monitoring refers to continuously tracking and analyzing a web app‘s availability, load performance, errors and other key metrics. It provides complete visibility into how real users experience your application.
Key Web App Metrics Tracked
- Response times – Page load speeds from end user browser perspective
- Throughput – Requests handled per second
- Uptime/availability – Frequency and duration of outages
- Error rate – Percentage of failed requests
- Application component metrics – Performance of database, API services, CDNs, object caches etc.
Monitoring Approaches
- Synthetic monitoring – Scripted simulations of user traffic from global locations
- Real user monitoring – Tracking actual production user sessions
- Infrastructure monitoring – App server, network performance metrics
- Log analysis – Parsing application logs for errors, traffic volumes etc.
Why Does it Matter?
- Business continuity – Prevent revenue and customer losses from application downtimes
- Brand reputation – Avoid bad press and customer frustration due to poor performance
- Security – Detect vulnerabilities like code injections, DDoS etc. before exploitation
- Agility – Fast isolation and diagnosis of issues across entire web app stack
- Customer experience – Identify conversion blocking performance problems and user journey breakdowns
Simply put, web application monitoring provides the actionable data technology teams need to collaboratively run flawless digital experiences that convert and retain users – making it indispensable.
Web Application Monitoring Tools – What Are Your Options?
Now that you know why web monitoring matters, next comes the critical decision of solution evaluation and selection.
With a multitude of commercial, open source and SaaS tools out there, narrowing down your options based on functional and pricing parameters can be challenging.
I‘ll cover key considerations across self-hosted and cloud hosted web application monitoring tools to help guide your decision.
Self-Hosted Tool Capabilities
What Does Self-Hosted Mean?
Self hosted web app monitoring tools are installed and run on your own on-premise or cloud infrastructure without relying on a third party SaaS vendor.
Considerations for Self-Hosted Monitoring
- Flexibility – Customize monitoring capabilities and data retention policies as needed
- Data security – Sensitive metrics remain within your controlled infrastructure
- Ownership – No vendor dependencies or subscription costs
- Skill needs – Resource overhead for tool implementation and management
Leading Open Source Options
Popular open source tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios etc. are self-hosted with no license fees. They offer flexibility but have a steep learning curve. Paid open core tools from vendors like Datadog provide more ease of use.
SaaS Application Monitoring Tools
What Does SaaS Monitoring Involve?
SaaS monitoring services run on vendor cloud infrastructure and offer monitoring capabilities on an on-demand subscription basis.
Benefits of SaaS App Monitoring
- Rapid time-to-value – Near instant deployment with no infra overhead
- Usage flexibility – Scale or pause monitoring as needed
- Rich functionality – Leverage vendor expertise and aggregated data
- Managed service – No need to maintain tooling or data pipelines
Example SaaS Vendors
Leaders in the web monitoring as a service space include Sitescope, Site24x7, Pingdom etc. Most provide generous trial periods to evaluate relevance for your workloads.
Comparison Between Self-Hosted and SaaS App Monitoring Tools
||Self Hosted|SaaS|
|-|:-|:-|
|Set up effort| Weeks | Minutes |
|Infrastructure needs| High | None |
|Cost| Low| High for large deployments|
|Flexibility | High | Varies across vendors |
|Functionality| Varies across OSS projects | Generally higher|
|Ease of use | Steep learning curve | High |
As seen above, both approaches have distinct pros and cons. Your choice depends on your team‘s capabilities, flexibility needs and cost considerations among other factors.
Now let‘s evaluate top options across both self-hosted and SaaS monitoring tools in the industry.
Top 10 Web Application Monitoring Tools Compared
After extensive research and expert consultations, I‘ve curated a list of ten excellent web monitoring tools suitable for different deployment types, technologies and budgets.
The solutions covered provide capabilities including uptime monitoring, synthetic monitoring, error logging, performance metrics dashboards and alert configuration across the web application stack – though specific capabilities vary.
Based on your application architecture and use case, you can pick the tools that align to your needs from this expert curated list.
1. Sematext
Overview: All-in-one web app monitoring solution for metrics, logs and synthetic monitoring. Integrates with popular open source tools.
Deployment Options:
- Fully managed SaaS
- Self managed Docker container
Pricing
- SaaS – $20 per host/month (14 day free trial)
- Self-hosted – Free tier for up to 3 hosts (Paid tiers start at $490/mo)
Key Capabilities
- Auto-discovery of infrastructure and application topology
- Customizable dashboards and heat maps for visualization
- Anomaly detection and alerting for 100+ app & infrastructure metrics
- Support for Docker, Kubernetes, Node.js, Java, Nginx apps
- Integration with Grafana, Prometheus, Logstash etc.
Ideal For
DevOps teams running diverse application architectures from traditional monoliths to cloud native microservices. Provides visibility across logs, metrics and user experience.
2. Checkly
Overview: API and web application monitoring optimized for modern DevOps workflows. Management via code and CI/CD integration are key highlights.
Deployment: SaaS
Pricing
- Free: 50K API calls/month
- Paid: Starts at $9/month for 1M checks
Key Capabilities
- Scripting of user journeys and API workflows using code
- CI/CD integration via CLI and YAML based configs
- Support for Puppeteer browser checks
- 150+ synthetic locations globally
- Real-time Slack and Teams notifications
Ideal For
Checkly uniquely blends robust web monitoring capabilities with infrastructure-as-code based management – appealing to forward thinking DevOps teams.
3. Pingdom
Overview: Venerable SaaS monitoring tool for website availability. SMS and email alerts with multi-step web transactions are standout features.
Deployment: SaaS
Pricing
- Starts at $15/month for 5 minute checks at 5 locations.
- Free trial available
Key Capabilities
- Configurable uptime monitoring from 90+ global locations
- Multi-step website transaction checks simulating user journeys
- Full page load performance data presented visually
- Flexible alerts over email, SMS, Slack, Teams etc.
- Public status pages for transparency
Ideal For
Want out-of-the-box, frills free website availability monitoring and alerting? Pingdom hits the mark.
4. Site24x7
Overview: SaaS platform for full-stack web monitoring with log analysis.
Deployment: SaaS
Pricing
- $9/month starter plan
- Free trial for paying plans
Key Capabilities
- Uptime checks from 50+ global locations
- Real user monitoring and session replay
- Network monitoring for packet loss, latency etc.
- Log parser for 3000+ app logs
- Integration with ITSMs like ServiceNow
Ideal For
With comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for networks, applications and user experience, Site24x7 is geared towards managed service providers and mid to large DevOps teams.
5. Prometheus
Overview: Ultra popular open source monitoring toolkit highly optimized for containers and cloud native infrastructure.
Deployment: Self-hosted
Pricing
- 100% open source with Apache 2 license
- No subscription costs just self-hosted infrastructure
Key Capabilities
- Custom metrics extraction and aggregation pipeline
- Optimized for ephemeral containers/instances
- Integration with Kubernetes, Grafana, AlertManager
- Auto discovery of targets using service discovery
Ideal For
Prometheus sets the standard for cloud native infrastructure monitoring leveraging modern DevOps pipelines. Well suited even for large scale deployments.
6. Uptime Robot
Overview: Straightforward and affordable website monitoring with wide protocol support…
7. ManageEngine Applications Manager
Overview: End to end application monitoring covering custom apps to ERPs like SAP and Oracle. First class enterprise scale capabilities…
8. Datadog
Overview: Cloud scale dashboard-driven APM and infrastructure monitoring tool with advanced analytics and collaboration capabilities…
9. Grafana
Overview: Open source data visualization and monitoring dashboards flexible enough for diverse metric databases…
10. AppDynamics
Overview: Industry leading but expensive application performance management tool with exceptional depth of capabilities to pinpoint bottlenecks…
Best Practices for Maximizing Web Application Monitoring ROI
Simply having web application monitoring running in production isn‘t enough. To maximize returns on your investment, you need to apply learnings to tangibly enhance user experience and business metrics.
Here are 9 best practices to adopt:
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Establish an Application Monitoring Center of Excellence – Have dedicated cross functional team of developers, ops and business analysts accountable for monitoring planning, implementation and performance optimization initiatives.
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Invest in dashboards and reporting – Consolidate monitoring datasets into intuitive dashboards contextualized for different personas – from CTO to support techs. This amplifies insights derivation. Prioritize anomalies, events and recommendations using severity ratings to guide issue analysis.
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Tune alert thresholds carefully – Avoid alert fatigue by calibrating performance degradation and usage threshold alerts judiciously. Map notifications to on-call schedules of respective teams.
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Simulate user journeys – Employ realistic session replay to catch intermittent errors that impact conversion funnel drop-offs.
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Integrate with ITSMs/collaboration tools – Sync monitoring alerts with PSA/ticketing systems for efficient assignment and resolution. Teams integration drives collaboration.
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Plan synthetic tests thoughtfully – Script user workflows reflecting priority application scenarios and complement real user data. Parameterize journey templates for consistent comparison across environments…
Monitoring Modern Web Application Architectures
While the tools and practices discussed so far apply broadly, realistically monitoring modern web app architectures like micro frontends, headless commerce and Kubernetes based setups requires specific considerations we‘ll cover now.
Microservices and Kubernetes Environments
Microservices adoption is accelerating, with 78% of organizations expected to transition over the next two years according to TechRepublic. Compared to monoliths, distributed container orchestrated app architectures have fundamentally different monitoring implications.
For one, ephemeral containers and dynamically orchestrated services make tracking unreliable using traditional host based agents. Granularity of metrics also increases massively across interdependent services.
Here are key capabilities your monitoring strategy should deliver:
- Auto-discover services and map dependencies
- Track container health, node metrics, cluster stats
- Monitor ELBs, service meshes
- Tracing across microservices
- Leverage logs, metrics, APM in correlation
Relevant Tools
Platforms like Dynatrace, AppDynamics and NewRelic provide robust APM optimized for container clusters along with capabilities like Kubernetes events integration. Open source tools Prometheus and Grafana are also popular.
Serverless Applications
By 2025, over 25% of enterprise apps are forecasted to be serverless according to Insider Intelligence. But debugging and monitoring functions running ephemerally across disparate services poses complexity.
Must have visibility across:
- Individual function performance
- Dependencies – Queues, datastores, external services
- Invoke errors and retries
- Concurrency scaling
Relevant Tools
AWS X-Ray provides end to end tracing of function activities and ties into CloudWatch metrics. Thundra also adds intelligent throttle detection, cost optimizer etc.
Single Page Apps and Micro Frontends
Modernizing legacy apps with modular component architecture accessed across web or mobile offers velocity but has monitoring implications….
The Future of Web Application Monitoring
Constant technology shifts rapidly expand the scope, scale and complexity of what needs monitoring for web applications. Going forward, AI assisted automation and process integration present an evolutionary path for the practice.
Intelligent and Predictive Monitoring
Expect smarter anomaly detection, root cause analysis and alert prioritization powered by big data and machine learning to enhance monitoring efficacy over reactive thresholds.
Application dependancy maps will also grow smarter using graph algorithms – reducing alerts noise. Prescriptive recommendations may even automatically remedy simple issues.
Right-Shift Security with RASP
Embedding runtime application self protection checks within app code as opposed to just perimeter scanning will grow. Approaches like instrumenting RASP agents will help identify malicious user journeys more proactively.
Process Integration
Closer monitoring integration will emerge across SDLC phases like CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure provisioning etc. – amplifying DevSecOps practices.
Cross-stack data correlation will also improve. Metadata interchange across APM, logs and infrastructure monitoring systems fills blindspots.
As web apps pursue escape velocity growth, the tools and practices keeping them measurable will continue maturing. Hopefully this guide has armed you to stay ahead of the dynamics in leveraging web application monitoring for your needs.
Let me know if you have any other questions on selecting or implementing web monitoring for your systems!
