Have you ever heard of the term “application performance monitoring”? Well, if not yet, it is important that you know your business needs this. It is not just a luxury but a practical way for your business to succeed. In this article and piece, we will introduce you to application performance monitoring and why this is crucial for your business.
What Is Application Performance Monitoring?
Application performance management and monitoring offer insights into the performance of an application. Frequently, these insights involve metrics that capture CPU usage, memory usage, response time, rest call performance, network latency, slow classes, and more.
An effective application performance monitoring or APM platform will ensure engineers can build out intuitive reporting dashboards that reflect not only timeouts and network performance but also displays slow application launches that affect clients’ satisfaction on top of offering defined and crucial flows to track performance changes through time.
Several of today’s leading APM tools are built upon a backbone of open source solutions. These usually include the Grafana and ELK Stack as these both offer comprehensive log, metrics, and trace analytics features highly necessary for application monitoring and optimization.
When your business seeks help from companies that conduct regular analysis of performance metrics, you can improve your application’s user experience by pinpointing unresponsiveness in the UI or user interface. Now that you have learned what APM is let us discuss its benefits.
11 Of The Best Benefits Of Application Performance Monitoring
The applications that your business uses have a crucial role in its success. Without these applications, your employees would not be able to accomplish their work. Thus, your customers would be unsatisfied. When these happen, your business will find it hard to succeed.
For this reason, tracking the performance of all the applications your business uses is vital. By doing so, you can take a systematic method to reduce common issues in your business.
Here are the benefits of APM, so you should not think twice about outsourcing them.
1. Offers A Proactive Approach To Problem-Solving
Among the several benefits of application performance management is taking a proactive way to solve problems. Instead of waiting for problems to transpire, you can anticipate them and carry out the necessary changes you need to avoid these problems happening in the future.
2. Reduced Operational Costs
With the use of APM software, you can reduce the operational costs in the business. You can eliminate the necessity for employees with specialized skills and instead use strong monitoring software to attain the same results.
3. Increased Revenue And Sales
You can increase your revenue and sales by using application performance monitoring tools. If your applications are not functioning well, you can experience costly delays impacting your sales. It is especially real and true when you are running or managing an eCommerce business, for instance.
4. Improved End-User Experience
If your business offers services, a provider’s application performance monitoring service can enhance your end-users’ experience. This can prevent problems and complaints from both your internal and external customers and clients.
5. Increased Productivity
Another reason why you must be monitoring your application performance is to boost your company’s productivity. By ensuring your applications and systems are running smoothly, you can avoid productivity issues in your business.
6. Reduced Downtime
When you work with companies that offer APM, you can reduce downtime in the business. This is one of the best benefits of this program, as downtime can result in lost productivity, thereby damaging your brand reputation, causing loss of data, and bringing about lost opportunities.
7. Better Customer Satisfaction
Ultimately, the best APM software will help make sure your customers are satisfied with your company and your services. With this software, they will never experience downtime, problems, or delays with their service. Happy customers are beneficial for businesses and will contribute to your further success.
8. Performance Prioritization
When speaking about application performance monitoring, there is always room for improvement. Though APM tools can monitor the performance of a given application by its definition, the direct advantages of these tools are insights into both application performance metrics and production-level performance in other environments. These insights make way for easier identification of discrepancies across various application environments while also providing a mechanism or system for diagnosing performance issues without affecting stability in your production.
9. Service-Level Agreements or SLAs Compliance
Compliance with SLAs is not only challenging but is also critical. Though there are well-documented approaches for keeping track of SLA compliance, you can have APM tools to generate reports that accurately demonstrate compliance, aside from the reports and metrics they already offer.
Instead of using an overly specific or proprietary toolset for generating SLA reports, using APM software can ensure the information you are using to report SLA compliance is similar to what the other parts of your business use when conducting their own operations. This reduces tool sprawl and increases confidence in the information by committing to an information collection standard for the entire company.
10. Track Business-Relevant Metrics
Aside from tracking customer-relevant metrics, APM tools can also be functional when tracking business-relevant metrics. With the right levels of customization and integration, APM software has the capacity to segregate metrics that are directly relevant to the business from those which are directly relevant to your engineering department, for one. These tools do not always lend themselves to key performance indicators or KPI tracking, but data about the application infrastructure can offer non-technical metrics that can be useful.
11. Increased Engineering Productivity
Much of the focus of APM is placed on the monitoring and health of production environments, but there is a strong and robust case for having them in pre-production environments too.
Though staging and development environments do not reach anywhere near the same range of traffic that production environments do, having APM integrated will help lover-hanging fruit that may otherwise be missed by standard integration and unit tests. This added information can help prevent defects before they occur, reducing ticket rework.
From system performance to exception handling, with more information the test and development teams have at their perusal, the more finely tuned the product can become before reaching the customer.
Feel The Difference
As you can see from earlier’s presentations, there are so many benefits you can experience by implementing APM for your business.
You can take a proactive approach to solve problems and reduce your operational costs. This has been mentioned earlier. You may also enhance the end-user experience, increase your productivity, and reduce your downtime, Monitoring your application performance will also improve your customer’s satisfaction.
In other words, using an application performance monitoring system is a great way to boost the success of your business.