What is APM?

Before starting any discussion on APM it is best to clarify the difference between application performance management and application performance monitoring.

Application performance management is the practice of monitoring, measuring and enhancing the performance and availability of software applications to meet stated levels of service. It involves monitoring application performance and addressing and resolving any issues that arise to meet end user expectations. Application performance monitoring is a subset of this in that it specifically focuses on detecting bottlenecks prior to them becoming issues.

Why APM Matters

Applications are the lifeblood of modern organizations and as technology continues to advance and customer expectations rise, businesses are turning to a variety of software solutions to stay ahead of the competition. Many have started to adopt microservices and cloud-native architectures to meet business outcomes and consumer expectations at a faster pace with applications increasingly deployed as a collection of distributed components. Maintaining deep visibility of the collective estate is essential for ensuring optimal performance in real-time.

Key Features of APM Tools

Monitoring the effectiveness is vital to maintaining efficient business operations with real-time insights being key to ensuring that the application estate is performing optimally. Specific monitoring features include:

End User Experience

Visibility of front-end performance aids in understanding how users are engaging with digital services and insights can be used to enhance user (customer) loyalty, reduce costs, retain customers and increase revenue. For example, managing a web application’s user experience can provide observations on how users with different demographics interact.

Map and Manage Application & Service Dependencies

Understanding and managing the interactions between infrastructure components is crucial to application performance management. Having a comprehensive understanding of the interdependencies and how they impact performance is also key to proactively identifying and addressing potential issues before they become incidents.

Application Analytics & Reporting

In addition to performance tracking, performance analytics can provide insights into individual application components for hybrid or microservices architectures which can be used for identifying areas for enhancement, predicting application performance in specific scenarios and helping to detect complex issues.

Application Performance Monitoring with Elastic

In a highly competitive landscape maintaining peak application performance is essential for achieving success.

In 2024, Elastic was named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms. Elastic offers companies a full-stack approach to observability with APM monitoring built-in. Teams do not need to work with multiple tools to get 360-degree views into their product. Elastic offers teams:

  • Visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud: Accelerate your digital transformation with observability for cloud-native technologies, such as Kubernetes and serverless. Elastic also offers native support for Open Telemetry.

  • Improved troubleshooting and efficiency: Break down silos across your organization and consolidate metrics, logs, and traces with a single view into your environment.

  • Powerful machine learning and analytics: Automate root cause analysis for your teams with innovative AIOps capabilities, such as APM correlations and anomaly detection.

  • User experience monitoring: Get a detailed view of how your users interact with your site with real user monitoring (RUM). Proactively catch web performance issues before your customers do with synthetic monitoring.

If you haven’t used Elastic yet, you can get a 14-day free trial and start using it alongside your other infrastructure components immediately.