Application Performance Monitoring Guide: What APM Is, Its Challenges and Its Benefits

Apps are getting more complicated — for better and for worse. When your application slows down, your entire business does too. Today’s complex apps can enhance user experience — but without careful management, they risk turning into costly headaches. Although the increasing complexity of apps gives them far more functionality, it also makes apps more difficult to manage. 

Application performance monitoring (APM) is the key to having efficient, secure, high-performing applications. An APM solution holds many advantages for your organization. Here’s a total guide to what APM is, how to get the full value out of your APM solution and how to apply APM to your workflows.

Application performance monitoring definition and background

Application performance monitoring is a software tool that uses specialized software and key metrics to monitor all aspects of an application. Enterprises can monitor their applications to optimize the app’s efficiency, increase security and improve user experience. In addition to monitoring the health and performance of the application itself, APMs can also monitor connections between applications and the underlying infrastructure to see how secure and efficient the application is. 

Many APMs also integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) into their processes to improve workflows, analyze data and give insights into the functioning of the application. 

Whether you have microservice-based applications or monolith applications, an APM can help you get the most out of your applications and use your resources more efficiently.

How APM reduces cloud costs and helps with GDPR compliance

 APM is an important part of understanding the health and performance of your distributed enterprise applications. Using an APM is an effective way to catch bugs, troubleshoot issues faster, monitor traffic for suspicious activity, detect performance issues and respond faster to issues. If you are struggling to comply with GDPR or other regulations, APMs can also help bring you into compliance. 

Additionally, implementing an APM solution is an important way to be proactive about the performance of your applications. APMs monitor the whole application, including the application stack, app framework, database, operating system and web application server. If there are any disconnects between any of those app components, an APM can identify them and help troubleshoot ways to fix them. An APM’s predictive monitoring can catch app issues before they happen, which prevents downtime, improves user experience, and keeps you compliant with regulatory guidelines. 

From a financial perspective, an APM is great for resource management: it can identify underutilized resources and help you right-size your architecture. By dynamically managing resource loads, APMs can also help you manage your resources (and costs!) more efficiently. With distributed tracing capabilities, an APM can identify bottlenecks and identify more efficient microservice request flows.

How application performance monitoring works: Dimensions and components

Application performance monitoring works by monitoring important functions of an application and giving you alerts and data about those applications. Gartner proposed five main APM dimensions back in 2010, and those five dimensions have created an application performance monitoring framework that is still largely used today.

1. End-user experience monitoring

An APM works by tracking end-user experience data (also called real user monitoring) to measure real-world performance across different devices, locations and networks. The software collects “passive monitoring” data from sensors, network traffic and error logs to better understand user behavior. Once the data is collected, companies can then create “active monitoring” data. Active monitoring and synthetic monitoring simulate user activity that is likely to happen. Active and synthetic monitoring help companies predict how a customer will behave and prepare to meet their needs. 

The better an enterprise understands user behavior, both present and future, the better the enterprise can improve user experience, boost customer satisfaction, improve customer loyalty and create products and services that meet customers’ needs — all of which end up boosting profit for the company. 

2. Runtime application architecture discovery and modeling

Runtime application architecture discovery and modeling is an essential part of how APMs work. An APM monitors application runtime architecture to discover more about its underlying infrastructure, how it works and how different parts of the application interact with other parts. Then, it can model the interactions that make the infrastructure operate, such as interactions with data centers, private clouds, public clouds and hybrid environments. 

When enterprises understand runtime application architecture, they can make the apps more efficient and find ways to streamline workflows. 

3. User-defined transaction profiling

As mentioned above, user experience is a priority for APM. Another way APM works is by implementing user-defined transaction profiling. User-defined transaction profiling tracks user transactions through the application stack. By understanding how user actions affect application components, developers can understand which features of an app are being used and which features aren’t. Developers can also catch errors or bottlenecks that are causing customers problems. 

4. Deep-dive component monitoring (DDCM)

Deep-dive component monitoring is an in-depth examination of a specific part of an application. This close-up study helps developers optimize the performance of individual components of an application to boost the app’s overall performance. 

5. Data analytics and reporting

Applications create and collect massive amounts of data. Another key part of how an APM works is by gathering, storing and analyzing data. APM can offer reactive information, like alerting users when it finds anomalies, as well as proactive information, like dashboards about performance trends and suggested optimizations.  

APM components

Some common components of an APM solution include:

• User monitoring capabilities (sometimes called end-user monitoring, real user monitoring or digital experience monitoring) 
• Session diagnostics
• Page diagnostics
• Availability and uptime monitoring
• Security monitoring 
• Tracing and diagnostics 
• Log management and error tracking
• Application data analytics and analysis
• Code profiling 
• Infrastructure monitoring  
• Synthetic monitoring

Best APM metrics to measure

APM creates massive amounts of data. The data that is most useful to you will depend on your organization and on your goals. However, these are some key APM metrics that you’ll definitely want to pay attention to: 

• Transaction tracing. Monitoring transaction tracing is more important the more complex your system is. If you have microservices, highly distributed systems or cloud-based applications, you can’t afford to miss transaction tracing. Transaction tracing tracks a request’s entire lifecycle across an application’s components. This helps identify bottlenecks, optimize app function, improves auto-balancing and load scaling and catches security issues. 
• CPU usage. Monitoring CPU usage can help you right-size your infrastructure and power usage, detect overloads and prevent downtimes. It’s also essential for optimizing app function and keeping your system stable. 
• Response times. An APM keeps track of response times because response times are indicators of user experience and system reliability. A slow response time can annoy customers, leading to lost revenue. Slow response times can also be a sign of bottlenecks and scalability issues on the back end of the application. 
• Error rates. Error rates are canaries in the coal mine for your application. If you see error rates start to rise, you can catch application failures early. A spike in error rates could indicate a bug that you need to fix, which improves user experience and prevents revenue loss from customers. If your error rates are consistently going down over time, you know that your strategies are working. 
• Uptime. Uptime is a key metric in assessing the health of your application. Of course, uptime is essential to a good customer experience, preventing revenue loss and improving disaster response. However, it could also be important for meeting service level agreement guarantees and regulatory compliance.  
• Instances. Most modern applications run across multiple instances, such as virtual machines, containers and serverless functions. Use your APM to monitor instances, which gives you insights into the app’s stability, scalability, availability and performance.
• Requests. Monitoring requests — which are the interactions between users and your application — with an APM is a major insight into user experience. Monitor requests to identify performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot errors quickly, balance loads more evenly and get a better picture of how your users are using your application.

Advantages of application performance monitoring

APM offers companies many benefits. By providing real-time insights into application performance and infrastructure usage, APM solutions help organizations balance performance, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. APM software is well worth the investment, giving enterprises advantages such as:

• Cost and resource optimization. Data from an APM can identify over-provisioned and under-utilized resources. This helps you use resources more efficiently, cut unnecessary resource waste, save money and avoid failures from overburdening containers. 
• Better product development. A major benefit of an APM is that it gives you insight into customer behaviors. With transaction tracing and request monitoring, you can understand how customers are interacting with your application and predict what kinds of functionality they’ll want in the future. Give your company a competitive edge by innovating new products based on APM data. 
• Great customer experience. The better you understand your customers, the more revenue-producing opportunities you can create. With an APM, you can analyze error rates, request monitoring data and transaction tracing to make the customer experience smooth. This increases customer satisfaction and leads to more loyal customers. 
• Increased operational efficiency. One of the biggest benefits you get from an APM is insights into the operational efficiency of your application. You’ll get details on how your application is performing, how it uses resources and where it’s experiencing bottlenecks. Getting rid of bottlenecks and streamlining request flows helps keep uptime and application performance high.
• Faster scalability. APM detects real-time traffic patterns to adjust auto-scaling policies so you can scale up to meet business demands and then later scale down to save costs. Auto-scaling supports application microservices and optimizes load balancing quickly. The data about scalability you get from your APM also gives you insights into future scaling needs so you can be prepared to grow and handle future workloads.  
• Tougher security. While monitoring data, an APM can identify suspicious activity and unusual traffic and alert you to potential threats. If there’s any unauthorized access or misuse of privileged access, you can know early and take action. APMs also help you be proactive about security by monitoring and identifying potential application vulnerabilities, like failing third-party integrations or certificate expirations. 
• Better team communication. When you share APM data across your company, you’re keeping all your teams on the same page. APM serves as a single source of truth. With real-time data, all your team members are working from the same set of metrics. Company leaders can use the APM data to set business priorities so teams are working on the same goals. APM data, when shared among teams, breaks down data silos and improves data democratization.
• Fosters continuous improvement. Data from APM not only helps you identify areas where you can improve, but it also opens up doors for your company to improve workflows and processes. These insights can help you improve individual applications as well as improve other applications your company is using and improve container function overall. 

Common challenges with application performance monitoring

APM solutions are valuable, but they also come with challenges. The advantages of APM are accompanied by several hurdles. Your organization may experience unique challenges depending on the solution you use and the applications you are running, but these are some of the most commonly encountered difficulties: 

Massive amounts of data

Data is gold. However, data is only as useful as far as it can be properly used and implemented. Simply storing the massive amounts of data generated and collected by applications can be overwhelming. Not only are you dealing with data generated by the applications themselves, but you’re also considering data related to network infrastructure, infrastructure management systems and business intelligence applications. On top of storing all that data, you have to find ways to sift through and analyze the data in order to get any use out of it. APM may not be able to handle the fire hydrant-water amount of data that’s being produced. APM solutions also may not be able to successfully synthesize the complexity of the data and determine relationships between multiple factors. 

Complex interconnected ecosystems

A common challenge with APM is the many complex interconnected ecosystems with an enterprise. One of the primary purposes of APM is to identify issues and bottlenecks. However, that is increasingly difficult to do the more complex your ecosystem is. It can be difficult to isolate performance issues and perform root cause analysis because the problem could be anywhere among many interconnected parts of a request or application. 

Tricky implementation 

Setting up APM can be time-consuming and complex, especially for organizations with a large, distributed system or microservices architecture. Then, once it’s implemented, you have to configure your new APM. It can be tricky to connect to and effectively monitor all your distributed applications across cloud, on-premise and hybrid infrastructures. If you’re already struggling with slow-performing applications, implementing APM can add overhead and increase latency if not configured properly, which defeats the purpose of APM. 

Ambiguous goals

This is one APM challenge that’s easy to overcome because it’s entirely within your control. One common struggle companies face with APM is not having concrete, defined goals. Executives get an APM, knowing about its amazing potential benefits, but then there isn’t a clear plan on what metrics are important to business goals. As mentioned above, data is only as useful as far as it can be understood and implemented. If there aren’t clear priorities, a properly measured baseline, and time-bound goals, you won’t get the full value from your APM. 

Reactive approach

APM is excellent at monitoring applications, collecting data and giving you alerts. However, these are mostly reactive metrics. Aside from some possible synthetic metrics, APM data is largely reactive — it alerts you when there is a problem, but it provides little guidance to prevent the problem in the future. Application performance monitoring is not the same as having full-stack observability. APM is also only functional at the application level, so without observation software, you aren’t able to solve problems that occur at container levels or higher in your system. 

Tips for building an application performance monitoring strategy

To set yourself up for success, you need a solid application performance monitoring strategy. This will help you get the most value out of your APM software as well as the full value of all the applications you’re using. Here are some application performance monitoring best practices we recommend. 

• Identify your goals. Before getting an APM, know what your organization’s specific goals are. Knowing your goals will help you select the right APM tool. Additionally, knowing your goals will help you define what success looks like and choose relevant metrics. You can’t achieve performance objectives if you don’t know what they are! Identifying goals will also help you understand how much value the APM has brought to your organization and how much progress you’ve made. 
• Set up auto-alerts. Don’t let security breaches slip by. Set up auto-alerts to identify traffic anomalies, catch transaction failures, and let you know when traffic spikes. However, part of a solid application performance monitoring strategy is knowing which alerts are important. If you have too many alerts, you can get overwhelmed or annoyed and start paying less attention to them. Be careful in how many alerts you set up and how many people you alert for each one. 
• Review reports. Again, data is only as useful as far as it is understood and implemented. All the APM reports in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t look at them and make changes based on the data. You’ll need to assign specific people to review reports (if it’s everyone’s job, it’s no one’s job). Consider scheduling regular intervals for review, clearly defining the objectives and actionable outcomes from these reviews.
• Use logging efficiently. Logging can create an immense amount of data. You need to log some data, of course, to understand how your application is functioning and record its status and activities. However, you can log information efficiently to save yourself from having to sift through too much irrelevant data and prevent memory overload from too much data.

Features to look for in APM tools

As you’re searching for the perfect APM tool, you’ll want to start off with what’s even possible. Know what’s in your budget. Understand what your current environment is to gauge whether the APM tool could integrate with your existing infrastructure. 

After that, keep an eye out for these useful features in the best APM tools:

• Real-time monitoring
• Easy-to-read dashboards and reports
• Distributed tracing and monitoring throughout all the layers in your system
• Scalability to grow with your organization
• Code-level visibility and root cause analysis to pinpoint exactly where issues are occurring

APM + SUSE

Application performance monitoring isn’t optional if you want to be competitive. SUSE solutions are here to help. Combine your APM tools with SUSE solutions for holistic monitoring across your environment. 

For example, SUSE Rancher Prime is excellent at managing your environment at the container level. Rancher is a perfect complement to APM tools, as APM tools work on the application infrastructure and microservices that underpin containers. If you use SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Cloud Application Platform, you can augment them with APM services to gain insights into cloud cost management, ensuring that resources are used efficiently, thus reducing cloud-related expenses.

To learn how an APM could accentuate your existing infrastructure and offer you more insights, contact SUSE today. 

FAQs on application performance monitoring

Want to learn more about application performance monitoring? Here are some frequently asked questions to give you a deeper understanding of APM

What is the difference between APM and observability?

There are several differences between APM and observability. There is overlap, so understanding APM vs observability can be tricky.

APM functions at the application level and is focused on application performance. It is largely reactive because it monitors data, but does not proactively solve issues. On the other hand, observability is a proactive, holistic, cloud-based approach to understanding application logging and monitoring. Observability tools focus on how applications interact with services and function within an overall architecture.

What are the key pillars of APM?

There are five key pillars of APM, which originate from Gartner. The five pillars are end-user experience monitoring, runtime application architecture discovery, user-defined transaction profiling, component deep-dive monitoring and analytics.

How do you monitor APM?

You can monitor APM by using several different tools to understand how your application is performing. You can monitor alerts so you know when something dangerous or unusual is happening in an application. You can monitor APM by reviewing data reports and measuring data to see how far you’ve progressed for certain business goals.