Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools are designed to monitor, manage, and optimize the performance of various software applications. They gather company-wide information, track important metrics such as system response times, availability, and user interactions and provide immediate insights into application inefficiencies.
The business benefits of these instruments include quicker and more efficient operations, positive user experiences, zero downtime, a smarter usage of resources, and lower costs.
What is APM?
Application performance monitoring (APM) is the practice of tracking key software application performance metrics using monitoring software and telemetry data. Practitioners use APM to ensure system availability, optimize service performance and response times, and improve user experiences.
Below are top 7 APM tools for application performance monitoring:
- Dynatrace
- New Relic
- AppDynamics (Cisco AppDynamics)
- Datadog APM
- Elastic APM
- Splunk APM
- ManageEngine Applications Manager
1. Dynatrace
Dynatrace is the application monitoring tool that provides accurate performance monitoring and reliable system availability. Every transaction is tracked and logged from browser to database, while the infrastructure is monitored to identify the root cause of performance issues across servers, databases, and code. This tool is fully dedicated to application performance management.
Applications that provide end-to-end transaction details can be monitored using this APM tool, with all information stored on the server. Reviewing logs and transaction history helps analyze performance issues and understand dependencies on external services.
2. New Relic
New Relic is one of the most popular tools in the application performance management industry. It presents information about many types of software and hardware components or about the user experience, and supports lots of technologies, either through its own agents or external plugins.
Examples of languages supported by the New Relic APM agent are: Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python and Ruby. Examples of technologies supported through the external plugins are: Oracle DB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Citrix NetScaler, PostgreSQL, Apache HTTPd, Nginx Web Server, Amazon Web Server, and more.
One of the best features is the detailed transaction monitoring, offering cross-application tracing and performance tracking of the SQL statements.
3. AppDynamics (Cisco AppDynamics)
Cisco AppDynamics is an Application Performance Management (APM) solution that can help your organization make critical, strategic decisions. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to solve application problems and prevent them from occurring in the future, as well as enhancing the visibility into your IT architecture.
It also aims to improve the availability and consistency of applications across the full technology stack by providing real-time performance insights. This helps your business enhance the digital experience, optimize performance, and fuel growth.
4. Datadog APM
Datadog is an application performance monitoring tool designed for IT operations teams and developers. It provides real-time insights into application performance and infrastructure health, helping teams quickly identify and resolve issues.
One of its key features is its error grouping capability which allowed it to group similar errors coming from my application into a single issue for easy identification of important errors and noise reduction. It also allows for the creation of error tracking monitors which can alert you when an issue in your application starts.
5. Elastic APM
Elastic APM is an application performance monitoring system built on the Elastic Stack. It allows you to monitor software services and applications in real-time, by collecting detailed performance information on response time for incoming requests, database queries, calls to caches, external HTTP requests, and more.
Elastic APM also automatically collects unhandled errors and exceptions. Errors are grouped based primarily on the stacktrace, so you can identify new errors as they appear and keep an eye on how many times specific errors happen.
6. Splunk APM
Splunk APM is an application performance monitoring tool that provides full-fidelity, always-on tracing to help monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance. It is commonly used to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, reduce MTTR (mean time to resolution), and improve the overall user experience of applications by providing end-to-end visibility into transactions.
7. ManageEngine Applications Manager
ManageEngine Applications Manager is a user-friendly, enterprise-ready, and cost-effective application management solution that enables organizations to monitor their critical applications and data centers efficiently. It enables monitoring of web applications, servers, databases, services, virtual resources, and public cloud systems.
It provides IT administrators and operators with a holistic view of their business environment, helping detect problems before they affect end users and reducing time to repair with an integrated management solution.
It also enables IT and data center teams to monitor applications, receive alerts, troubleshoot problems, track trends, and plan capacity from a single web console.
Conclusion
APM is essential to ensure software application availability, making using such a tool a must, especially if you’re running a SaaS business. APM tools help DevOps understand how application releases affect service performance, security, and reliability.
They enable teams to set up alerts to detect and solve issues before they impact user experience and set up automated actions based on specific events, patterns, and trends.
