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Monitoring and managing application performance are critical processes that allow for diagnosing issues and, consequently, maintaining expected service levels. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools are used for this purpose, enabling multi-level performance control. What exactly are they? Why is APM important in application performance testing? The answers to these and other questions can be found in this article.
What are Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools?
By definition, software for application performance monitoring (APM) allows you to track performance metrics of your business-critical applications, receive immediate alerts when performance issues occur, and generate reports for periodic performance analysis. Therefore, APM tools are used to monitor and manage code performance, application dependencies, transaction times, and the overall user experience. APM allows for measuring advanced indicators regarding, among other things, application performance, service maps, or user transactions in real-time. The goal of using APM is to constantly monitor application performance and resolve emerging issues. These tools help identify and understand the root causes of potential performance problems, enabling their rapid resolution.Why is application performance monitoring important in application performance testing?
Using APM in application performance testing is important because it allows you to track every transaction generated by a given application. This enables the observation of, for example, which requests are accessed most frequently and which functionalities are running slowly and require improvement. APM tools used for monitoring application performance track its operation in real-time, thus enabling a much faster response to emerging incidents and errors. This also helps avoid application downtime, thereby reducing the risk of potential losses. As a result, the company gains a competitive advantage, allowing it to grow and increase its revenue. Performance monitoring also positively impacts the satisfaction of end-users, who can enjoy a flawlessly operating application.What does APM actually measure?
By definition, APM monitors application performance. What is hidden under this concept? In this case, performance monitoring should be understood as measuring all applications across all environments. This also includes test and production environments, which is merely a matter of proper configuration. The basic tasks of Application Performance Monitoring therefore consist of:- monitoring servers,
- tracking logs, which allows you to check how often a given service is used and in what timeframe,
- tracking and monitoring application errors,
- monitoring network traffic to detect latency,
- tracking application dependencies, such as APIs and databases,
- using Google Analytics, which helps avoid delays.
What are the biggest problems associated with APM tools?
The biggest problems associated with APM tools involve the manual implementation of solutions aimed at improving application performance. Using Application Performance Monitoring therefore requires proper cooperation from a team of IT specialists who will quickly react to emerging incidents that reduce application performance. An experienced team oversees the entire performance monitoring process, which, combined with the ability to anticipate problems, guarantees the correct operation of the application. Specialists must also properly interpret the indicators received from tests, which allows them to implement corrective actions to improve application performance.The best APM tools
There are many APM tools available on the market, and the best ones include:- AWS – in the offer of the leading cloud service provider, you can find application monitoring tools such as AWS X-Ray, Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens, or Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics. They enable, among other things, responding to performance changes, identifying unusual behavior in environments, and optimizing application performance during scaling;
- Datadog – a tool that allows for precise, real-time monitoring of application performance. Analyzing all data from one place enables the detection of critical errors before they are noticed by end-users;
- Zabbix – an open-source solution that enables real-time monitoring of thousands of data points from servers, virtual machines, applications, or network devices. Monitoring indicators such as network usage, CPU load, or disk space consumption allow for the rapid detection of problems;
- Grafana – another open-source tool that allows for creating queries and visualizing application performance indicators using customized data. Customizing the tool to specific needs is facilitated by the ability to create dashboards containing panels representing specific metrics over a defined time interval.
