Exploring application performance monitoring (APM)

The rise of technology has pushed businesses to optimize their digital experience. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a startup or a well-established enterprise; if you want to stay relevant, you have to be quick enough to deliver flawless user experiences.

In this fast-paced world, monitoring applications is a critical aspect of a smooth-running business. This blog post discusses what application performance monitoring (APM) is, how it works, and why it's essential in today's world.

What is APM?

APM is the practice of using real-time data to track an application’s performance and the digital experiences of your end users. APM helps businesses detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to ensure that applications meet their expected level of service.

While the terms “application performance monitoring” and “application performance management” are often used interchangeably, and you may also see terms like “performance monitoring” or “application monitoring” used to also describe this set of tools and process.

Why APM is important

Nobody wants to deal with a broken or slow app, whether that’s end users or the teams maintaining and building an application. As technology evolves rapidly, customer expectations for seamless, fast, and reliable digital experiences do as well. Cloud computing, mobile applications, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices have made the IT landscape more distributed and intricate, making maintaining application performance even more challenging. However, with an APM tool, you can sidestep that complexity and proactively monitor, diagnose, and optimize the performance of your application. This gives you the time and confidence to identify and resolve issues before they impact your end users while strategically making decisions to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction. As dependence on digital services grows and complexity increases, APM becomes more indispensable than ever to a modern IT strategy.

The benefits of APM tools

Let’s explore the advantages of implementing an APM solution.

Exposes the root cause of issues

Finding the root cause of software bugs and performance issues is often like peeling an onion—each layer you remove reveals another beneath it. APM simplifies exposing root causes by tracing requests across every component of your full stack. Rather than getting bogged down in surface-level errors, APM illuminates the deep, underlying drivers of issues. With code-level insights, you can pinpoint bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and problematic dependencies no matter where they originate—your own application, infrastructure, or third-party services.

Cutting through complexity with a unified full-stack view

APM provides you with deep code-level insights and visibility into all application components, including web services, databases, caching layers, third-party APIs, infrastructure resources, and more. You can see the interactions between components.

Reduces revenue loss from downtime/degradations

Even short outages or slow response times can have major revenue implications for modern digital businesses. Customers simply won't tolerate laggy pages, error messages, or failed transactions. Instead, they'll abandon shopping carts, bounce from your site, and take their business elsewhere. 

APMs reduce application downtime by taking a proactive approach to monitoring potential performance issues and alerting teams so that they can take action to prevent an issue from escalating. APM provides a root cause analysis as well as deep visibility into application performance across a variety of devices and platforms. 

By maintaining a consistently reliable, high-performance experience, you avoid potential losses from abandoned purchases, failed conversions, compliance penalties, and customer dissatisfaction that can irreparably damage your brand's reputation.

Improving resource utilization and right-sizing infrastructure

With APM's granular visibility into application performance across the full stack, it becomes clear when infrastructure is over-provisioned and underutilized - a surefire way to overspend on cloud costs.  Conversely, APM data illuminates when workloads have maxed out server capacity and additional resources are needed. This situational awareness allows you to continuously right-size infrastructure up or down as demands fluctuate. With those insights, you can refactor code and fine-tune configurations to get maximum performance out of your existing infrastructure investments. Whether running on-prem or in the cloud, APM empowers organizations to avoid over-provisioning and eliminate resource waste.

Improves end user experience

End users expect speed and reliability when they use web applications. They want optimized performance and fast response times.

Users will abandon a website within seconds if it’s not loaded. Even worse, if someone has a bad user experience, they’re more likely to move on to a competitor. A Forbes study suggests that 12% of users would actually warn friends and family against engaging with a particular app or site, which can have a detrimental impact on business success, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation.

Creates ease for engineering teams

Application performance issues also cause huge headaches for engineering teams. An on-call engineer might get a critical system alert at 3:00 AM regarding business transactions that leads to entire teams trying to solve a problem in the middle of the night.

It’s even worse when a critical issue arises without any clear context, leaving engineers uncertain about the root cause of the problem. The issue might be coming from an API, Kubernetes cluster, cloud service, or any number of other locations from code to cloud. The longer it takes to solve, the more it negatively impacts customers and the company’s bottom line.

APM helps engineering teams pinpoint issues quickly—and solve issues proactively. For example, an engineering team could set up a critical threshold that sends an alert when page loading times become too slow, then combine that with detailed tracing to quickly pinpoint the cause and fix it before end users are affected.

The alternative is learning about the issue from end users, which means they’re already impacted—and then scrambling to solve the problem without the additional context that APM provides, resulting in longer mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Core features of APM solutions

At their core, APM tools provide deep visibility into the live performance of your applications and underlying infrastructure, no matter what type of application you’re monitoring. This visibility is the result of a powerful set of monitoring capabilities that work in unison to give you an end-to-end view across your entire technology stack. The key features that make up a comprehensive APM suite are:

Operational dashboards

Operational dashboards provide a high-level overview of how your application is performing. You can customize operational dashboards to display your most important monitoring metrics, ranging from golden signals to custom key performance indicators (KPIs) to any services you are monitoring.

Real user monitoring

Real user monitoring, also known as RUM, provides insights into what real users are doing in your application, and how well the application is performing for those users.

Synthetic monitoring

Synthetic monitoring involves using a headless browser to mimic the behavior of real users. Practitioners can test specific user flows proactively without relying on data from actual users.

Serverless monitoring

Serverless monitoring allows you to monitor the performance of applications that use cloud-based services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) instead of on-prem servers.

Database monitoring

Database monitoring allows you to monitor the performance of your database so you can determine how long queries are taking.

Mobile monitoring

Mobile monitoring allows you to monitor iOS and Android applications, including latency issues and crash history. 

Infrastructure monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring is necessary for getting insights into how your infrastructure is performing, whether that’s your hardware, cloud infrastructure, or Kubernetes clusters.

Service maps

Service maps allow you to quickly see your application’s connections and dependencies, which is especially important in large applications that use thousands of services.

A good APM solution also gives you the opportunity to query your telemetry data to get deeper insights, examine logs, and use distributed tracing to examine a series of events and find the root cause of any issues.

Choosing an APM solution?

APM solutions are designed to help businesses monitor and manage the performance of their applications. The variety of solutions and their capabilities have evolved as technology has improved. But basic APM software will be able to gather data on various aspects of an application, such as page loading times, response times, and error rates.

APM tools

A good APM tool should answer the following questions:

• “Is an application broken or slow?”
• “If the application is broken or slow, what’s causing the issue?”

DevOps and engineering teams can use APM tools to answer these questions and quickly find and fix issues before they affect real users.

With so many APM tools to choose from, it can be challenging to know which is best. The best APM tools will have these key features:

• Comprehensive visibility into the application’s performance.
• Real-time monitoring to detect problems swiftly and prevent disruptions.
• User-friendly design with an intuitive interface and easy navigation for users of different technical levels.
• Customizable dashboards that can be tailored according to your team’s specific needs and metrics.
• Proactive alerting capabilities, notifying teams of any issues ASAP.

APM metrics

Metrics offer insights into performance. If metrics lean unfavorably, it signals to teams that there may be an issue that needs to be addressed, preventing the problem from escalating. APM utilizes several key metrics to ensure ideal functionality. These include:

• Response time: The measure of time taken for an application to respond to the user’s action.
• Error rate: The frequency of errors generated by the application.
• Request rate: The number of requests received by an application per unit time.
• Application availability (uptime): The total time the application is running and available for use.
• CPU usage: How much resource storage the application is taking up.
• Application performance index (Apdex) score: The relative performance of the app in comparison to “normal” performance metrics.
• Service level agreement (SLA) score: Quantifies the level of service a customer can expect from a service provider, outlining specific performance benchmarks that the software application should achieve. This score is calculated using response time, error rate, uptime, and number of requests within a given time period.

Who uses APM?

APM is an important practice for all enterprise companies, whether or not they’re in the tech industry. Because most companies have a web presence, it’s necessary to monitor the performance of any web assets and the overall experience of their end users. But which teams are using and benefiting from APM solutions?  Use cases can vary based on the size and scope of the application.

• DevOps engineers automate processes related to testing, deployment, and maintaining applications in production. APM is an essential DevOps best practice.
• Site reliability engineers (SREs) take a software-based approach to operations. Their work is focused on ensuring that applications are reliable. It’s absolutely essential for SRE teams to use APM to proactively monitor site reliability.
• Software engineers write code and build new features. At smaller companies, software engineers may be involved in every part of the process, including monitoring code in production. Even at larger companies, engineers are increasingly involved in many parts of the software lifecycle.

How do you get started with application performance monitoring?

In order to integrate application performance monitoring, you need to install agents that track the data flowing through your application. This process is known as instrumentation, and it’s often as simple as using a command line interface (CLI) to automatically install any agents you need. These agents collect and report information on both web and non-web transactions. You can also use custom instrumentation to add additional detail to transaction traces or to block the instrumentation of transactions you don’t want to track. When using a CLI to automate the instrumentation process, you can start sending telemetry data to your APM solution within minutes.

Complex distributed applications use many different services, and ideally, every part of an application should be instrumented. A comprehensive APM tool provides integrations to many popular services such as AWS and Azure, so you can quickly instrument any third-party dependencies in your application.

Ultimately, you can pick and choose which features you need for your application and what exactly you want to instrument. You’ll see the most benefits from an “all of the above” approach, meaning that you have full end-to-end monitoring, also known as observability, for your applications.

What’s the difference between APM and observability?

APM is about monitoring an application’s performance, but many modern application architectures are too complex to monitor and manage with just APM. APM provides a high-level view of how an application is performing, but to get to the root cause of an issue in large, complex applications, it’s necessary to take a more technical approach.

Observability is about having deep, technical insights into the state of your entire system, no matter how large or complex it is. While APM provides aggregated metrics, you also need other tools like distributed to drill down into your data.

APM is one part of observability, and observability is a superset of APM. With many applications, it’s necessary to have a full observability solution.

To learn more about the differences between APM and observability, see APM vs. observability.

Get real-time  insights with New Relic APM 360

Traditional APM tools are causing challenges in the new age of technology. That’s why you need to upgrade to the next evolution of APM—New Relic APM 360.

New Relic APM 360 offers real-time insights into critical health metrics across the entire stack and application development lifecycle in one place. With APM 360, your team can prevent issues with a glance at a dashboard, debug faster, and eliminate monitoring gaps through guided workflows and data recommendations.

Application Performance Monitoring FAQs

How do you assess application performance?

There are several ways to assess the performance of an application. APM strategies and tools alert your dev teams to errors and issues before customers experience them. 

With APM software, you can assess your application’s performance from a single dashboard. Here are the most common assessment methods:

1. Monitoring: Collect data on various performance metrics, such as response times, resource usage, and error rates, and then analyze that data to identify trends and potential issues.

2. Load testing: Simulate real-world usage scenarios, such as a large number of users accessing the application at the same time, to see how the application performs under stress.

3. Performance profiling: Analyze the application's code to identify bottlenecks or areas that could be optimized for better performance.

4. User feedback: Collect feedback from users about their experiences using the application, including any issues they may have encountered.

5. A/B testing: Compare two versions of an application to see which one performs better.

6. Synthetic monitoring: Monitor an application's performance by simulating user interactions with the application in a controlled environment.

What should I monitor in APM?

There are several key metrics that you should monitor when using APM tools:

1. Response time: How long it takes for a request to be processed and a response to be returned.

2. Error rate: The number of errors that occur in the application, such as failed requests or unhandled exceptions.

3. Resource usage: The amount of system resources, such as CPU and memory, that the application is using.

4. Throughput: The number of requests that the application can handle within a certain time period.

5. Latency: The time it takes for data to travel from the client to the server and back.

6. User experience: The overall satisfaction of the users with the application.

7. Business metric: The impact the application has on the business, such as the number of transactions, revenue, conversion rate, etc.

It's important to monitor these metrics over time to detect trends and patterns, and to be able to identify when and where performance issues occur in the application.

Also, it's important to note that depending on the specific requirements of your application, you may need to monitor additional or different metrics.

How do you assess application security risk in production?

Zero-day vulnerabilities are previously unknown risks that can allow threat actors to exploit production applications and services for data theft, extortion, or disruption of your business.

To continuously assess application risks, use New Relic Vulnerability Management to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities by application or service, and then test if these vulnerabilities are actually exploitable using New Relic interactive application security testing (IAST).

1. Vulnerability assessment: Monitor open source libraries within applications and services for common vulnerability exposures (CVEs).
2. Impact analysis: Filter vulnerabilities by severity, count, scope, source, and steps to remediation in order to prioritize efforts.
3. Vulnerability surface area audit: Monitor the vulnerability of all your entities, libraries, number of services using a vulnerable library, active vulnerabilities, and when they were first and last seen.
4. Proof of exploit testing: Simulate a real-world attack to test if an application’s vulnerabilities are actually exploitable by a threat actor.

What are the benefits of APM solutions?

There are several benefits to using an application performance management solution. 

1. Improved insights and faster response time: APM solutions give DevOps and engineers greater insight into all aspects of an application. If a problem occurs, teams have greater insights into the root cause of problems, allowing them to act faster to resolve them.
2. Better user experience: By monitoring the performance of an application, APM can provide insights into how to improve the user experience. This can help organizations ensure their applications are running smoothly and providing a positive user experience.
3. Increased app reliability: APM software can detect and diagnose problems, such as slow response times or high error rates, that impact the reliability of an application. By addressing these issues, you can boost the reliability of an application.
4. Improved app performance: APM can save money by helping organizations identify and address performance issues before they cause major problems, such as system downtime or lost revenue. 
5. Better business performance: APM solutions can provide detailed information on how the application is impacting the business, such as the number of transactions, revenue, conversion rate, and other key business metrics. This information can be used to optimize the application and improve the overall business performance.

APM solutions can help organizations ensure that their applications are running smoothly, providing a good user experience, and impacting the business positively.

How do you monitor application performance in production?

There are several ways to monitor application performance in production. Application performance in production combines several factors, including: 

1. Browser monitoring: Collect data on the performance of the application as it's being used by actual users. This can be done by using JavaScript tags that are embedded in the application's code to collect data on the client side, or by using proxy servers to collect data on the server side.

2. Synthetic monitoring: Simulate user interactions with the application in a controlled environment, such as a test server, to measure performance.

3. Log analysis: Analyze log files generated by the application to identify performance issues, such as slow response times or high error rates.

4. Application instrumentation: Add code to the application to collect data on performance metrics, such as response times and resource usage, that can be used for monitoring.

5. Infrastructure monitoring: Collect data on the performance of the underlying infrastructure, such as servers and network devices, that the application is running on.

6. Third-party tools: There are several third-party tools that can be used for monitoring application performance in production, such as APM tools.

APM can help monitor all of these factors in one dashboard so you don’t have to run various different tests to get a holistic view of the app environment.