What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?

Application performance monitoring (APM) is the process of using software tools and telemetry data, including distributed tracing, to monitor the performance of running applications. Organizations want to make sure that that they maintain expected service levels and that customers receive the application performance they expect. APM tools deliver near-real-time data and insights into the performance of applications with dashboards, application metrics, logs, alerts, and distributed traces. Using APM, IT teams, DevOps teams, and site reliability engineers can do tasks such as pinpointing application performance issues, infrastructure planning, and tracking service level objectives (SLOs).

Application performance monitoring is important for both internal operations and external clients. Monitoring internal applications helps in continuity of business services so that your teams can perform their jobs. Monitoring client applications helps make sure that your customers can access and use your services as expected.

APM helps make sure that your digital services run smoothly, with minimal downtime, and that your customers consistently receive positive experiences with your application performance. Here are several benefits of APM.

Rapid root cause analysis

APM reduces mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) with relevant metrics, logs, and traces for root cause analysis. This rapid diagnosis keeps downtime to a minimum. Engineering teams have more time to develop new applications instead of troubleshooting existing apps.

Optimizing operating costs

IT teams use APM tools to right-size infrastructure and resources. By monitoring resource performance data, teams learn when they need to scale up or down to keep applications performing optimally. This helps to keep operating costs optimized for workloads. Application performance management is the downstream effect of monitoring.

Effective product development

Application performance monitoring tools can be part of a product's development process. You can implement APM in a test environment and use APM tools to monitor and analyze synthetic traffic, uncover limitations, and identify errors. Development teams can discover anomalies before an application goes live and fix bugs that would previously only have become evident after launch.

Business collaboration

APM dashboards are customizable for various audiences. You can use APM to share relevant metrics and analysis across business units or with other key business stakeholders.

Customer satisfaction

APM is an effective tool for pinpointing where performance bottlenecks occur across a software application. Using APM, engineers can notice service degradation before it has a downstream impact on customers. By solving emerging problems before they affect your customers, you keep customer satisfaction high. Set alerts for figures below your customer-facing service level agreements (SLAs) to give you time to create new solutions.

Here are some common metrics that application performance monitoring (APM) tracks.

CPU usage

APM solutions can monitor CPU metrics such as CPU usage. This makes sure that your application is getting the compute resources it requires to operate adequately. Setting service level objectives (SLOs) with alerts for usage can remind you to scale up or down.

Response times

Response times are significant, as your users expect to be able to access services without delay. APM solutions measure against an acceptable baseline app performance for response times and alert you if response times exceed the threshold.

Error rates

APM software monitors applications to record and report error rates. An example of an error is when a web inquiry times out or a database query fails. The APM solution delivers alerts when the error rate rises above predefined parameters, for example, when 5% of the last 50 requests have resulted in an error.

Transaction tracing

Transaction tracing in APM gives you an accurate picture of single transactions carried out in an application. Information captured in transaction tracing includes function calls, external calls, and database calls. The APM solution monitors the transaction request from start to finish.

Instances

An APM solution can monitor and report how many server or application instances your apps are running. The solution can alert you to scale up or down to meet user demand.

Requests

APM software monitors how many user requests your application receives. By monitoring the traffic, the software can send alerts on finding any anomalies. For example, the APM solution can alert you to unexpected increases in requests, large numbers of requests from the same user, or unusually low requests.

Uptime

Uptime is critically important for enterprises providing online services. Many service level agreements only allow a percentage point of downtime across predetermined periods. APM monitors application availability and compares levels to those agreed upon by the service provider and customer.

Here are some use cases of application performance monitoring (APM).

Real user monitoring

Real user monitoring, or end-user experience monitoring, collects and analyzes user data to build an understanding of an application's performance levels. By establishing a baseline for acceptable performance, you can accurately predict when an application will experience issues. For example, if the number of customers experiencing problems when trying to check out items is above the threshold, the APM sends an alert to the relevant teams.

In contrast, synthetic monitoring simulates user behavior to capture problems before the application’s release to production.

User-defined transaction profiling

You can use APM solutions to recreate common user interactions with applications. This is known as user-defined transaction profiling, and it follows the full path from user interaction through to response. User-defined transaction profiling helps you understand the conditions under which issues occur with your digital services. IT teams commonly use this approach to troubleshoot applications and fix common user issues.

Component monitoring

Component monitoring, or application component deep-dive monitoring, comprehensively tracks all of an application’s components. This monitoring and analysis shows an application's complete performance. Monitored resources include memory usage, servers, CPU utilization, and network components.

Infrastructure monitoring

You can use APM tools to collect data from across your entire IT infrastructure, such as servers (server monitoring), containers (container monitoring), databases (database monitoring), virtual machines (VM monitoring), and other backend systems. This monitoring detects performance problems and finds the root cause of application errors. Infrastructure monitoring covers all running applications, not just one.

Read about infrastructure as a service (IaaS) »

Analytics

Effective APM solutions provide data for analytics that you can use to fix or improve applications. Some APM tools use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms to conduct predictive analysis, diagnose root causes of errors, and link complex application performance problems.

Read about artificial intelligence on AWS »

SLA and SLO monitoring

Service level agreements (SLAs) are critical components of contracts between an IT services provider and a client. They set out the required levels of service that are agreed upon by both parties. APM can monitor the performance metrics in SLA frameworks, which helps providers make sure that they are meeting contracted expectations. It also highlights areas where providers might fall below the standards outlined in the SLA. SLAs are most common for business-critical applications. You can set service level objectives (SLOs) in the APM that fall below the ceiling of the SLA to address performance before it impacts clients.

Observability involves instrumenting code and infrastructure to output metrics, logs, and traces. Tools such as APM work with observability to gain insights into the outputs of those metrics, logs, and traces. APM consumes the outputs of observability to make it easier to diagnose performance issues and understand the current and historical state of systems.

Read about observability with AWS »

There are many factors to consider before you integrate an application performance monitoring (APM) solution and its suite of tools into your IT environment.

Team buy-in

Make sure that your teams understand the rationale and benefits of introducing APM. You need to find a solution that fits in with existing systems and processes your team is comfortable with.

Features

There are numerous APM tools available. Make sure that the APM solution you introduce has the right tools for your applications and that it supports your technology stack, including programming languages.

Cost requirements

Introducing APM can demand considerable compute resources, especially if you plan to monitor several applications. Make sure that you have the necessary budget for computing resources, along with the cost of the APM itself.

Ownership

Consider who will oversee and own your APM. For example, you will need to determine whether IT or developers will be responsible for the APM’s maintenance and administration.

AWS has a range of services that can help provide visibility into your application performance:

With Application Observability (APM), you can spot and fix application issues before they impact your customers. APM provides one-click setup with automatic instrumentation across Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, and more. APM shows automated insights from prebuilt dashboards that highlight your most critical telemetry.

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service where you can monitor applications and obtain insights into operational health, so that you can respond to performance changes, optimize resource use, and improve security. CloudWatch also lets you set up alerts for service level agreement (SLA) and service level objective (SLO) endpoints and UI workflow monitoring.

Get started with application performance monitoring (APM) on AWS by creating a free AWS account today.