What is an application performance monitoring tool, and why do you need it?
Tags: devops, automation, performance, devjournal
Published: 2022-05-19 15:58:43

Nowadays, businesses rely on their applications for their everyday needs. As such, performance plays a key role in any application’s success. The demand for new applications has led to rapid deployment. With the decrease in development time comes a lot of underlying complexities. To deal with these complexities and to monitor the application’s performance for future updates, application monitoring tools or APM tools exist. Let’s try to understand in depth about APM.

##What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application performance monitoring ensures that the application is performing as expected. As modern-day applications are built on highly distributed systems, they are in constant flux with each other. Therefore, APM software is crucial to manage all critical parts of an application and troubleshoot performance issues. APM does this by monitoring and managing the technical performance of the application, and the user’s perceived performance as well. This is achieved by specific APM tools. 

##Why do you need application performance monitoring tools?

In simpler terms, APM tools give administrators the necessary information needed to quickly pinpoint performance issues that negatively affect the application’s performance. 

According to Gartner, APM tools must meet the following three primary criteria -

**Frontend monitoring** - Deals with user experience monitoring for both desktop and mobile-based end users

**Application tracing and diagnostics** - Involves multiple features like the discovery of application elements, determining the relationship between them, and code diagnostics. Lastly, it ensures how the application responds to user requests. 

**Analytics** - logs all the application data and discovers patterns using various techniques. This helps find the root cause of performance issues in the application and anticipate future problems. 

##Types of APM tools

There are majorly three different types of APM tools namely.

**App metric-based** - Collects several app and server-related metrics to let us know which URL requests are slow performing.   

**Code profiling-based** - Performs code profiling and transaction tracing to drill down exact performance issues. APM tools also leverage machine learning in combination with application metrics to identify the root cause of performance issues. 

**Network-based** - Such APM tools measure application performance based on network traffic. Only a handful of tools in the market are capable of performing network-based performance monitoring. 

##Examples of APM tools

In today’s day and age of IT automation, [Application Performance Monitoring (APM)](https://www.simform.com/blog/devops-tools/) is the standard practice of monitoring the performance of an application. APM tools ensure that the services provided are up to a certain standard and help you identify any performance issues.

###AppDynamics

[AppDynamics](https://www.appdynamics.com/) focuses on full-stack application performance management and IT operations analytics. Whether it’s deep diagnostics, transaction flow, or end-user monitoring for distributed applications, it’s your one-stop solution. The tool integrates well with .Net, Python, Java, C++, Node.js, etc. Moreover, AppDynamics agents are plug-ins or extensions that monitor the performance of your application code, runtime, and behavior.

####Key features:

- Analytics-driven approach for solving any problem
- Intelligent insights help to find and fix issues at the earliest
- Transaction capturing that happens in an app periodically
- System-wide data recording
- Average performance and false positives analysis
- Easy to install, use, and understand for a beginner

###Appium

[Appium](https://appium.io/) is an open-source tool to automate native, mobile web, and hybrid applications. The cross-platform tool is in massive demand as more people are focused on mobile apps. For example, people converting their website into a mobile app can also use it to verify if the app exhibits native app behavior. In addition, Appium uses mobile JSON wire protocol to drive native, mobile web, and hybrid apps.

####Key features:

- Parallel execution of test scripts
- Automates testing of web, native and hybrid apps
- Desktop application testing for Windows
- Single API for both Android and iOS
- No need to add any agents to simulate app store behavior
- A strong and active community of developers


##Wrapping up

Troubleshooting performance issues in modern-day distributed systems can be tough. APM tools provide a helping hand by finding the needle in the haystack with ease. One can proactively monitor and manage their application’s performance in terms of code, user experience, network traffic, etc., with the help of APM tools. Do you have any more exciting facts about APM to share? Let us know in the comments below.