Guide to application performance monitoring (APM) — what you need to know

If you’ve got a slow ecommerce website, you’re pushing away customers. They might spend only a few seconds before moving to a competitor website that loads quicker. 

Similarly, if your app crashes frequently or comes to a halt, your clients might take little time to switch to a competitor. 

In both cases, you end up denting the bottom line. 

While you can push your IT team to fix the root of the problem when it arises, prevention is better than cure. You can prevent many of these incidents with a system that monitors web application activities. And that’s where application performance monitoring (APM) comes in.

By taking proactive measures, you can reduce bottlenecks and downtime, improve customer experience, and drive business growth.

Specifically, we’ll cover:

• What is application performance monitoring?
• Why monitoring your application is important
• Do you need to adopt APM?
• How APM works
• What are APM tools?
• What metrics do you track with APM tools?
• APM use cases
• Application performance monitoring best practices
• Final thoughts: What is APM

What is application performance monitoring? 

Application performance monitoring is the practice of monitoring and tracking applications to ensure they operate smoothly and meet expectations concerning performance, availability, and end-user experience.

APM is best for websites and mobile apps, but you can also expand to include the processes, hosts, logs, and networks that access these applications.

Besides the technical aspect, APM also considers user experience via security and availability metrics to get a holistic view of the end-user experience.

While learning about application performance monitoring, you might encounter the term “application performance management.” You won’t want to mix them up, especially since they have the same acronym, so it’s best to understand the differences.

Application performance monitoring vs application performance management

Application performance monitoring is a subset of application performance management.

Monitoring focuses on tracking how well the software is functioning. In contrast, management looks at the bigger picture, such as how the user interacts with the app and how the app interacts with other software and hardware. 

By application performance monitoring, you can detect when the app runs into an issue. On the other hand, application performance management tells you where you need to allocate resources to serve the end users best. 

Here are some more specific benefits of APM.

• Faster diagnosis and resolution of performance problems.
• Improved stability, uptime, and resource utilization.
• Fewer incidents of sub-par performance.

• Improved collaboration and productivity.
• Better user experience and customer satisfaction.

Challenges to consider before opting for an APM

Application performance monitoring has many benefits, but it’s not foolproof. Here are some difficulties you might encounter while using APM.

• Unclear goals: You need to have a clear reason to monitor applications to know where to start or what to look for.
• Using the wrong metrics: APM tools record data for metrics. It’s up to you to decide which metrics are relevant to fulfilling company goals.
• Too much data: Cloud-native applications are increasingly popular, but they generate large quantities of data. This can sometimes make APM challenging as it becomes more difficult to sift through the noise.

Application performance monitoring solutions that are shifting to tracking observability can help with data noise. And you can bypass other challenges if you have clear goals and know what you should be tracking. 

So let’s see if APM is the solution to your problems. 

Do you need to adopt APM?

Now that you know what APM is and what it accomplishes, the biggest question is, does your organization need it?

Here are a few questions to ask before implementing APM:

• What problem are you facing? What are your goals?
• Do you have data you can collect to modify and measure these goals? Identify these metrics.
• Do you have the staff, technology, time, and other resources needed to implement APM?
• What APM tools will you use? Are they compatible with your software environment and workloads critical to your mission?

If you’ve answered the above questions adequately, you’re more than ready to apply APM to your website or app.

How APM works

APM solutions observe your app under normal parameters and record data to establish a baseline, also called telemetry. If the real-time data deviates from the baseline, APM solutions alert you, so you can troubleshoot. 

To better understand how APM works, consider these five components of managing app performance. They’re based on Gartner’s definition of APM.

Digital experience monitoring

Also known as real-user monitoring, this component includes gathering user data and performance metrics, such as load time and response time, to assess how they correlate to app performance.

Previously known as end-user experience monitoring, the term was expanded to include non-human entities, such as bots or other software components, which interact with applications and have their own expectations of performance. 

There are two ways to track digital experience: synthetic monitoring and agentless monitoring. 

Synthetic monitoring, or active monitoring, uses bots to simulate user behavior and predict problems that could occur. In contrast, agentless monitoring, or passive monitoring, analyzes network traffic using data probes, load balancers, and switches. This reveals infrastructure information, such as the app’s location or the device’s operating system.

Component monitoring

Component monitoring, also called application monitoring, involves a comprehensive analysis of all IT infrastructure components, including:

• Servers.
• Memory usage.
• CPU utilization.
• Operating systems.
• Databases.
• APIs.
• Network components.
• Application frameworks.

Business transactions

Business transactions, also called user-defined transaction profiling, help examine, trace, and recreate specific user interactions. It’s used to determine and visualize application dependencies. 

When supplemented with component monitoring, business transactions add another layer of information that helps IT and dev teams solve complex problems.

Infrastructure monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring involves collecting data from several types of IT infrastructure to identify problems, find the root cause of errors, and plan for future upgrades. 

Other types of specialized data collection fall under this category, such as: 

• Server monitoring.
• Container monitoring.
• Database monitoring.
• Availability monitoring.

Analytics and reporting

The analytics and reporting component takes the gathered data and synthesizes it to:

• Determine a baseline for normal app performance.
• Resolve performance issues using historical data.
• Predict and prevent future issues.
• Identify areas for improvement.

These components are crucial to understanding what APM is. With thorough knowledge, IT teams will better understand how these elements and pathways interact to provide a top-tier user experience.

App metrics-based tools

App metrics-based tools capture app and server metrics to determine slow requests. However, these tools are typically not sophisticated enough to identify reasons for poor performance.

Today’s APM solutions rarely cater solely to app metrics. Most tools integrate app metrics with other functions.

Code-level tracing tools

Also called code profiling tools, code-level tracing tools use artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform transaction tracing and look at different code types to determine the exact cause of an issue. 

Network monitoring tools

Also known as network performance monitoring, network monitoring tools identify application performance by measuring network traffic.

Compared to the other two tool classifications, this is a newer, more advanced category, so only a few APM tools currently fall under this type.

What metrics do you track with APM tools?

APM tools measure two types of metrics: end-user experience and infrastructure resources.

Here are some common application performance metrics you may monitor:

• Response time: The time it takes a user to receive a response from an application.
• User satisfaction: Also known as Apdex score, this metric measures user satisfaction based on request response time.
• Uptime: Also known as app availability, this metric measures the reliability of a system as a percentage of time it remains online to fulfill user requests. 
• Error rates: The number of application errors over a given timeframe.
• Request rates: The number of requests over a given timeframe. The more requests, the busier the application.
• Garbage collection (GC): A form of automatic memory management for applications written in Java, Node.js, and other programming languages. A large value indicates increased memory usage.

APM use cases

When is using application performance monitoring tools a good idea? Let’s find out.

SaaS applications

Software as a service (SaaS) applications are on-demand applications hosted on a cloud environment and made available to users over the internet.

For enterprise SaaS companies, managing the service can be challenging since it relies on so many variables, all required to run smoothly. An APM tool can help by breaking down performance issues and giving companies the data they need to improve availability and performance.

Ecommerce websites

One of the best use cases for application performance monitoring is ecommerce websites.

First, ecommerce websites have many facets interacting with one another — product catalogs, inventory management, shopping carts, payment processors, third-party integrations, and more — all of which run on a complex tech stack. For example, if you want to correctly set up WooCommerce, a popular online store solution, you’ll first need a working WordPress platform, then you’ll need PHP, MySQL, and so on.

Second, ecommerce customers demand fast loading speeds. According to a 2022 Portent study, a B2B website that loaded in one second inspired a conversion rate five times higher than a B2B website that took 10 seconds to load. 

One piece of the puzzle is to optimize your ecommerce website’s speed by using caching and a content delivery network (CDN). But you’ll still find value in APM tools because they detect issues before they arise, so you can prevent downtime and lost revenue.

WordPress multisites

With WordPress multisite, you can create a network of websites from a single WordPress installation. Multisites are handy when you want to set up related business websites or a community network.

However, since multisites share server and database resources, they’re prone to overloading and other performance issues. For example, if even one website is poorly optimized or receives high traffic, the whole network of websites can fail. This also makes multisites difficult to maintain and monitor. 

Having an APM solution handy helps ensure your security and lets you quickly begin troubleshooting at the first sign of an issue. We also recommend eliminating these risks further by choosing the web hosting plans optimized for multisite configuration. 

For instance, with Liquid Web, you can enjoy multisite support with managed WordPress plans or managed WooCommerce plans.

New Relic helps small business owners find performance bottlenecks, and you don’t even have to leave the Nexcess dashboard.

Choose the best APM tool

The APM market is saturated with different tools — it may be difficult to pick one. That’s why it’s important to identify your goals.

No idea where to look? Examples of good APM tools to use are New Relic, Stackify, and Dynatrace.

Train your staff

Having the best APM tools is of no use if your staff doesn’t know how to implement them. Your IT team should know the application like the back of their hand and know how to interpret data.

Invest in continually upskilling and training your staff to maximize the benefits of APM.

Select relevant metrics

Application performance monitoring tools come with built-in and custom metrics, but these mean nothing without the context of your goals.

Select the right metrics and share them with business leaders so they can understand the relationship between IT infrastructure and business applications. This approach will improve strategic planning and bring the most out of your application performance monitoring solution.

Create workflows that tackle problems

Create a workflow that aims to investigate and analyze what goes on when issues arise. The goal is a set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) your team can refer to when you aren’t around. Revisit and update those SOPs regularly.

Test and review data

Test and retest the data collected to ensure it’s valid. Study reports and familiarize yourself with trends. Your system might already be experiencing undetected problems that are very hard to spot without the high familiarity and pattern recognition.

Final thoughts: What is APM

Think about how many customers and clients depend on the performance of your websites and mobile applications. IT operations and DevOps teams should prioritize preventing performance issues, as these affect productivity, customer experience, and business growth.

At Liquid Web, we recognize this by offering reliable, high-performance hosting plans that scale with your business as you grow. Your website will always run at peak performance with Liquid Web’s premium web hosting services. Check out our plans or reach out to get started today.