An Insight on Application Performance Management and its Importance

Application Performance Management (APM) is an important concept in the field of Information Technology and Systems Management. It is considered as the management and monitoring of performance as well as the availability of various software applications.

The market of APM was valued US $4.629 billion in the year 2017 and it is estimated that it will reach to US $8.773 by the year 2023. During this period, it will show a CAGR of approx 11.25 %. Increasing demand for mobile and cloud computing and storage is driving the need for Application Performance Management (APM) globally.  Here it should be stressed that due to complex applications designs as well as lack of awareness, the market growth during the above mentioned period will be restrained.

Based on the trend of keeping the healthcare records of patients, the healthcare industry will lead to a boost in the demand for APM or application performance management. Rising demand for big data analytics is further propelling the growth of the global application management performance market. Furthermore, the growing adoption of automation and the need for log management in various industries will also boost market growth. 

The expansion of business services like e-Commerce as well as online loan processing will ultimately lead to the expansion of Application Performance Management across the world.  Digital transformation is changing the way companies do business, so it should come as no surprise that the applications that deliver business services are under pressure to keep up. For any mobile app development company, there is a great importance of APM.

What is Application Performance Management?

According to experts like Wikipedia, APM tries to detect as well as diagnose various complex problems in software applications. This is important to achieve the expected service level. In other words, an Application Performance Management allows mobile app development companies to monitor the performance of business-focused applications. It also allows mobile apps to send alerts in case of performance issues, and generate reports for periodic performance analysis.

On the basis of Gartner study, APM services should meet three key functional dimensions:

• Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
• Application Discovery, Tracing and Diagnostics (ADTD)
• Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) for Applications

Segmentation

Application performance management market has been divided into three parts: 

By Deployment Model:

• On-Premise
• Hybrid 
• Cloud

By Access Type:

• Mobile APM
• Web APM

By Industry Vertical:

• BFSI
• Government
• Retail
• Travel and Transport/Logistics
• Healthcare
• Communication and Technology

By Geography:

• Americas
• North America
• South America
• Europe Middle East and Africa
• Europe
• Middle East and Africa
• Asia Pacific 

Types of Application Performance Management Tools

Some of the different categories of application performance monitoring (APM) tools include:

 

App Metrics based Tools:

App metrics based tools can tell mobile app developers, how many requests app gets and potentially which URLs might be slow. Based on applying the code level profiling it is not difficult to find it.

 

Code-Level Performance:

Tools like Stackify Retrace, New Relic, Riverbed SteelCentral, AppDynamics, Dell Foglight and Dynatrace are used to check the transaction tracing and code profiling.

 

Network Based: 

Extrahop generally utilizes the term APM for its ability to measure the performance of various applications based on the traffic in the network. An exhaustive product category known as NPM is focussed on these types of solutions. 

Although network-based APM is still limited in terms of its vantage point, as it's typically used for seeing how long an application takes to travel between hops on the network. It's an important perspective that many vendors are including it within their suite of APM tools.

Some other tools do monitoring based on server and application metrics, and refer to their products as Application Performance Monitoring solutions. It is important to know the server CPU or average web-server response and APM helps to provide much more information in this regard. By utilizing the techniques like code profiling as well as other techniques of data collection, the APM tools can render detailed tracing of the transaction. 

Why APM is Necessary?

As mentioned earlier, APM is a concept having great importance in mobile app development process. Some very common problems can be identified quickly by utilizing application performance management.

1. It helps by tracking the application’s usage as well as assist in understanding the spikes in traffic.
2. It helps the application owner to find slow speed as well as connection problems. It finds these problems based on dependencies like SQL, caching, queues, etc.
3. The Slow SQL queries can be readily identified by APM.
4. Highest volume as well as slowest web pages can be identified through APM.

Pros/Cons

Pros: 

1. Very fast and seamless service delivery is rendered to the end users by the use of APM
2. Customer experience on the web applications and websites is greatly improved by the use of APM.
3. The overall business productivity can be escalated based on the high level of performance rendered by the apps.

Cons:

1. Firstly, the tools of APM are all not free. You have to take paid subscription of the tools for effective usage.
2. Secondly, it takes time to master the complete APM process. The learning curve for APM is quite steep.
3. There are many different tools available for APM and thus, it is difficult to master all the tools available.

Features of APM

Some of the common features of APM include the following:

1. An important feature of APM is that performance of all the web requests and transactions can be assessed.
2. Another important feature is that code level performance profiling can be performed through APM.
3. The usage as well as performance of different application dependencies like web services, caching and database can be assessed by the use of APM.
4. Very detailed traces of transactions and web requests can be obtained by the use of APM.
5. Effective server monitoring can be performed based on the metrics like memory, CPU etc.
6. The metrics of Application framework like JMX MBeans, counters, etc. can be measured through APM.
7. Various custom applications metrics can be created by the development team or business representatives.
8. Application log data can be obtained through APM.
9. The errors in applications can be assessed and solved.
10. Real User Monitoring can be performed through APM. 

Conclusion

APM is an important concept in the field of Information Technology and Systems Management. It is considered as the management and monitoring of performance as well as the availability of various software applications. It strives to find and diagnose different problems pertaining to the performance of different software applications. For any mobile app design and development company, the utility of APM or application performance management is great.

Summary

This blog covers all the important aspects allied to the concept of Application Performance Management or APM, and it’s different tools, features as well as Pros/Cons of APM are discussed.