Eliminate Application Performance Bottlenecks to Improve User Experience

Last week our house flooded. It wasn’t a major flood but we did get some damage in a couple of rooms. A storm came out of nowhere and deluged the house with water for about 30 minutes. Turns out that our storm water drainage had bottlenecks that we weren’t aware of and just wasn’t up to the task.

The same things can happen with Application Performance. How do you you know that your network and applications are going to give you the reliability and performance your business needs? Just like a plumber could have helped us find out where the bottlenecks were before disaster struck, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) can help ensure you identify where your applications are going to be slowed down.

Get a complete view of Application Performance

APM helps organizations improve user experiences by tracking key software application performance metrics using monitoring software and telemetry data. Without Application Performance Monitoring, teams struggle to identify and resolve the numerous problems that can arise, causing customers to become frustrated and abandon the app altogether, impacting revenue and brand image.

Application monitoring is a great way to gain a full view into the user experience, application performance, and database availability. Businesses of all sizes use various applications daily for different processes and need to deploy tools throughout the application environment and supporting infrastructure to monitor real-time performance. To get a complete view of application performance, you need to monitor the following:

• Digital/user experience encompassing both real-user and simulated experience for assessing performance in production and non-production environments. This type of monitoring collects performance metrics, including load time, response time, uptime, and downtime, by analyzing the user interface on the end-user device.
• Application performance monitoring involves overseeing the complete application and infrastructure. This comprises the application framework, database, operating system, middleware, web application server and user interface, CPU usage, and disk capacity. Monitoring applications at this level can help identify code segments that could be causing performance issues and check the availability of software and hardware components.
• Database availability monitoring helps assess the performance of SQL queries or procedures and the availability of the database.

But is it any different for cloud-native applications? The rise of cloud-native applications poses several challenges despite their well-established benefits. Complex applications, composed of numerous microservices, generate huge amounts of data, which needs to be centrally managed and analyzed to proactively identify performance issues. The speed at which data is generated is also a challenge. These factors have made application performance management more challenging in cloud-native environments.

The many benefits of APM

A good Application Performance Monitoring solution offers many capabilities, such as:

• Dynamically maintain real-time awareness of application and infrastructure components through automatic discovery and mapping.
• Gain end-to-end visibility into the application’s transactional experience to comprehend its impact on business outcomes and user experience.
• Monitor mobile and desktop applications on browsers to track user experience across different platforms.
• View root-cause and impact analysis to identify performance issues and their impact on business outcomes for faster and reliable incident resolution.
• Integrate and automate service management tools and third-party sources to scale up or down with the infrastructure.
• Analyze the impact on user experience and its impact on business KPIs.
• Monitor endpoint devices and application performance issues.
• Monitor virtual desktop infrastructure to maximize employee productivity.

Clearly, businesses can benefit in many ways by gaining visibility and intelligence into application performance and its dependencies. Real-time monitoring helps detect performance issues before they affect real users, expanding the technical and business benefits list, which includes:

• Increased application stability and uptime
• A reduced number of performance incidents
• Faster resolution of performance problems
• Improved infrastructure utilization

Investing in a good Application Performance Monitoring solution ensures reliable intelligence and insights that enable teams to align faster, and identify and isolate issues for faster problem resolution. Performance monitoring has rapidly expanded to encompass a broad range of technologies and use cases. Modern applications, though built using microservices, are highly complex and run in containerized environments hosted across multiple cloud services, making it even more essential to get end-to-end visibility.

And just like good storm water drainage, you’ll get the performance when you really need it.