Application Performance Management Software

What is Application Performance Management?

As its name implies, application performance management (APM) involves three main areas: app availability, management of the app performance, and improvement of the user experience. When employed, APM monitors two main areas to make sure that the app is running quickly and smoothly. First, it examines the speed of the system and network infrastructure running the software app. Then, it looks at the speed of the end-users’ transactions. By looking at these two areas, APM creates an end-to-end overview of your app’s service and interruptions that may have occurred.

This means that your APM is looking at load testing, synthetic monitoring, and even real-user workings to gauge uptime and overall app speed. These measurements are often done through an integrated SaaS, through an on-premises tool, or through a suite of software tools. The main benefit of using APM to manage these areas is that you will get an overall analytic perspective about the app software performance so that you can continue to improve the end-users’ experiences of your application.

As with many technical terms, there is some argument in the software industry about what exactly APM means. Some professionals indicate that the APM acronym stands for application performance measurement or application performance monitoring, but these alternate acronyms really skew the intended meaning of this tool. For instance, calling it application performance monitoring puts the emphasis on the technical monitoring aspect of the tool, indicating that the app should use a device like AlertSite to constantly monitor your performance. Likewise, indicating that software should undergo application performance measurement emphasizes the necessity of data metrics. Another common explanation of APM is application portfolio management, but, again, this term stresses on the overall view of a software application’s portfolio rather than digging into the app itself.

Applying today’s software can be difficult and intimidating whether you’re creating online video games, service software, or even personal device apps. The development cycle of applications is intricately involved, and it requires that you take into account the great complexity of the system architecture itself. This complexity will undoubtedly bite you at some point in the process. You will have a team of system administrators, developers, and even testers that must work together throughout the creation process, and just one weak link in this tenuous system can cause you problems. Think of encountering a sluggish API connection or unhelpful third-party CDNs; just these potential issues can negatively impact the performance of your app, leading to more conflicts and eventually a poor opinion by your consumers at the completion of the development.

The current business landscape is cut-throat, and you understandably want to get your app developed from brainstorm to completion as quickly as possible. However, you cannot compress the progression so much that the customer experience suffers; poor performance will lead to the loss of customers, especially for web-based applications. Your app must be easy to use, consistently working, and ready to go at all times. These issues are best addressed with application performance management.

However, this article will focus on the idea of application performance management because this term more clearly encompasses the comprehensive tools and processes of your software application so that you can use it to continue your software development and to address your app quality.

Understanding Application Performance Management

In the past, dealing with application performance management was an area left for system admins and maybe an ops team. Today, however, APM is a necessary tool for just about anyone involved in the software app creation, development, and distribution. Managing application performance has become much easier and more user-friendly than ever before, and it has become a necessary part of the creation, testing, and business processes.

For example, software app developers can more effectively manage the quality of their work, especially with your operations team, as they expand the software application. This will allow them to easily troubleshoot and monitor their progress throughout the development process.

On the other hand, operations personnel are more likely to use APM tools to create and to run tests for desktop and mobile applicability in an attempt to locate and prevent potential problems with performance in the two interfaces.

Even your business leaders can get involved, using an APM to track online revenue and to manage web transactions for the business.

Despite having multiple views and applications for this tool, the end goal is really the same: Get a clear picture of the way that the software app works before it goes live and encounters preventable problems. With all the members of your team working together with APM solutions in their respective fields, you will find that fewer issues in app performance will catch your group off-guard. Your team can work together to use the same APM results to discover, to collaborate, and to reduce development problems.

Obviously, all original software applications are created, processed, and distributed differently, and all apps are intended to meet different goals. However, the goal of using APM is basically the same: deliver the best possible user experience.

With the massive complexity of the many different web servers, mobile carriers, cloud-hosting services, and web browsers, the possibility of user problems is massive. As an internet user yourself, you know how the system works. For instance, if you are surfing the web and the site suddenly grinds to a halt, taking forever to load. What is the problem? Unfortunately, it could be one of several different issues. Was it a problematic link? Is there a problem with third-party content? Or is there an issue with the internal processing of your web host? As a user, you might not know, but you are annoyed with the delay. As a business leader using APM, you would be able to monitor issues like these, to identify the problem, and to create a quick solution that improves performance. No matter if the issue was deep in the web layer, in the network, or even in the mainframe backend, APM can reveal the bottleneck, pinpointing the issue and analyzing the root cause.

In addition to these qualities, APM’s load-testing and real-user monitoring tools reveal the ways that others view your website from just about anywhere worldwide. These “visual users’ experience” monitoring tools can look at and even emulate users’ web browsers and mobile devices to discover the speed at which content is displayed and the quality of the page’s visual appeal. This allows your team to view your app from a human perspective, giving them the ability to monitor metrics and fix bugs and to create the best real end-users’ experience, which is the only performance indicator that truly matters.

How Does APM Work?

Consider the online user experience. What annoys users more than almost anything else? For most people, it is slow response times even more than app unavailability or downtime. Part of the reason is that e-commerce research shows that slowdown happens almost 10 times more often than complete outages, and when those slowdowns occur frequently, it will affect your site’s clientele and ultimately your commercial bottom line. To put it more simply, just because your application is live, it does not mean that it is constantly accessible and working perfectly. You are probably already monitoring your IP protocols and network services, but APM is a more comprehensive approach to this monitoring process that will improve your overall reliability and speed.

Based on research conducted by tech firm Gartner, there are at least five specific areas of application performance management that you should include in your program for a full-featured approach. Those steps include:

1. End-users’ experience monitoring – Consider this your first step with APM. Ideally, it will help you find an issue as it first negatively impacts your app’s user.
2. Runtime application architecture – This should include discovery, modeling, and display for your app architecture. These areas will likely be generated and monitored to create an overall idea of your application and your problem.
3. User-defined transaction profiling – Take a look at your user-defined transactions as they flow through your app as they are exhibited by the runtime of the architecture. This could help you figure out the sources of problems in your transaction process that could be impacting your end users.
4. Component deep-dive monitoring in an application – After you have completed the previous three steps, deep dive into your results, and consider the context and the impact on the end-users.
5. IT operations analytics – Finally, take a look at your analytics to discover the true root cause of the issues from all the volumes of data that you have generated in the previous four steps. Even if you do not find any initial problems, keep in mind that looking at your data could allow you to better anticipate potential issues in the end-user experience.

While it may seem that these five steps from Gartner are pretty straightforward, there is a great opportunity here for even further exploration and analytics from the initial data. The technical functionality lends itself well to more APM tools, such as automated packet capture and code injections. In addition, utilizing SaaS solutions will only take a few minutes to set up with APM, which means that users are never running an outdated software and never need to update any components of your app themselves in order to use your software.

The current issue facing many software app companies is that they are not taking full advantage of APM, and this means that they cannot easily cover all parts of Gartner’s steps. Instead, many companies are pulling their current tools from different vendors in an effort to quickly and easily piece together the performance part of their apps. While this effort may help companies get their apps up and running quickly to capture the available audience, it does not help them stay on top of their applicability problems. Then APM functionality slips away even though the app is functional from a business and IT perspective. It also means that Gartner’s initial step, the end-users’ experiences and the most important goal of all, goes by the wayside.

If you look at the current marketplace for software app APM, you will see a lot of big data analytics being the focus of vendors. This completely ignores the end-users’ experiences; it does not place the needs of the humans interacting with the apps in importance. If you ignore your users, you will lose their business. There is a reason that Gartner focuses on users first and IT last, and you should maintain that emphasis for your own app as well by continually optimizing your users’ experiences. Focus on your app’s speed, reliability, and functionality, and you will have the most success.

What’s the Future for APM?

Many tech observers criticized the idea of application performance management in the beginning. These naysayers felt that APM was little more than a grand vision that could never deliver the experience that it promised. However, technology is changing fast, and content on the internet is changing even faster. This means that for every second that an application is in slowdown, there is likely a loss in both overall revenue and customer loyalty. The danger of these losses means that APM has now become a necessity for your software application.

Of course, there are still many companies that will simply cobble together their app tools to get their apps up and running. There are also single vendors that will sell completely integrated total packages to your company so that you do not need to make your own system. However, these options are few and far between, and they will not likely be configured specifically for your app.

The application performance management system of the future is rapidly becoming user-experience management, also known as UXM. Even with this shift in system, the end-users’ experiences will remain the most important aspect of your monitoring. Keep your company’s time and money focused on this aspect of the development process. UXM, however, will help you see the places where users’ experiences are less-than-optimal, and it will test your app to diagnose the root cause of the problem. When you know the underlying problem, you can target it very specifically to resolve the issues.

If you are considering something like UXM but are unsure of the benefits to making this change, think of the process this way: Why would you continually put time, money, and effort into the arcane system that you are currently using when it would make little or no change in the end-users’ experiences? Why would you throw away all that time, money, and effort? If you are going to work on and pay for updating and truly affecting change on your current app, focus on keeping up with the most current options, like UXM, rather than employing a system that is already or that will soon be outdated.

Pay attention to the details of functionality and perceived performance in your software app. This is the definition of what UXM is and what it focuses on. Set your app’s team to innovating, optimizing, and focusing on the end-users’ experiences, and that will give you a strong advantage over your company’s software app competitors. If implementing this method with fidelity takes you a little more time to develop, it will still be worth it. Your carefully developed end product will be better than the quickly released option of your competitor. When that competitor’s site breaks down, yours will still be running strong, and your users will be thankful and will reward you with revenue and loyalty.

Embrace that fully integrated APM that holds up your users’ experiences, and that advantage may push your software app over the finish line first while those companies clinging to data analytics become a thing of the past.