What is Application Performance Management in a cloud-native ecosystem?

Introduction

Application Performance Management (APM) empowers organisations to integrate performance management and monitoring tools to leverage the potential of observability, surpassing response times, system accessibility, and performance. In addition, harnessing APM solutions with modern computing can potentially enhance the user experience.

What is APM

APM can also be referred to as Application performance monitoring as it works on particular measurements & metrics, while Application Performance Management enables organisations to develop & assist performance strategy for an app. 

According to Gartner, "Application performance monitoring (APM) is a stack of monitoring software that encompasses digital experience monitoring (DEM), app discovery, tracking & troubleshooting, and AI for IT processes."

Application Performance Management (APM) is a strategy to continually monitor, track and manage the application's overall performance to enable a flawless user experience utilising telemetry data and system management software. 

It notifies administrators about not meeting the performance baseline to measure the application performance. Moreover, offers visibility into the primary cause of performance-related issues and automatically rectifies performance issues preliminary to impact users or the organisation.

Why businesses should leverage APM

Modern customers rely more on apps to shop, have fun, stream movies & TV shows, and connect and consume information via social media, especially in the work-from-home era. 

But what will happen if an app crashes, takes time, or even fails to load? The user gets frustrated, which in turn can turmoil the brand's reputation or even cause a loss of revenue. For the digital team, application optimisation becomes difficult as modern applications are highly complex because they consist of a magnitude of lines of code and several interconnected digital services.

Digital teams can leverage the expertise of APM tools to view and introspect the variables impacting the performance of application networks. These tools help eliminate the likelihood of abandoning the app by the customers due to a poor experience.

Application Performance Management features

APM offers a set of features for application networking and performance, ensuring end-to-end app visibility with a seamless user experience. Let's explore the core capabilities of Application Performance Management.

Application Log Data

It is a centralised logging system that contains a log monitoring package that helps developers access logs when troubleshooting an application.

Root Cause Analysis

In the case of software flaws and data misconfiguration, it becomes difficult to find the latency problem. Therefore, the root cause analysis feature for application optimisation escalates the diagnosis process by identifying the glitches in an app.

Mobile and Web Application Monitoring

It monitors mobile and web browsers to track users' experiences on different platforms.

Database Monitoring

It identifies database-related problems and visualises the overall performance of the application networks to isolate bottlenecks.

Integration, Automation & Service Monitoring

Integration with third-party and service management tools to align with growing infrastructure.

End-user Experience Monitoring

Application networking tools assist in discovering how application modifications impact end-users.

IoT Monitoring

Users often use applications via mobile devices; therefore, IoT monitoring assists in managing JavaScript and C/C++ apps. Businesses incorporating IoT are dependent on performance management in their attempt to deliver sustainable endpoint management solutions. These applications will turn out to be an overwhelming source of data, and there will be a significant demand for IoT monitoring.

The profound benefits of APM

Application Performance Management offers exceptional user experience and server performance with enhanced visibility and lower operating costs.

Let's look at the core benefits of APM:

Industrial Benefits

• Reduce downtime
• Lower operating costs
• Cut down costs on experts
• Fast & responsive software
• Enhanced infrastructure implementation

Elemental Business Benefits

• Improved end-user experience
• Backlog prioritisation
• Speed up innovation
• Boost sales & revenues
• Advanced productivity

How Application Performance Management works

APM works in three profound steps-

1. Collects the relevant performance data to check whether the app is performing or not.
2. Analyse that data to encounter the prospective performance problems that arise in the software application before it can impact the end-user by leveraging digital experience monitoring, availability monitoring, and database monitoring. 
3. It provides a comprehensive solution for application optimisation based on standard performance, potential issues, and bugs. Therefore, APM helps in taking proactive measures to troubleshoot the problems.

Parameters measured by Application Performance Management

The key to enhancing the user journey is understanding how your app runs in real-time. API drives profound solutions to measure the server performance and understand the significant improvement in user experience.

APM solutions can be measured by considering performance metrics. Some of them include

• CPU usage
• Error rates
• Response times
• Number of instances
• Request rates
• Application availability 
• Customer satisfaction
• Impact of third-party components
• Application errors
• Server metrics
• Custom application metrics

How cloud-native apps make APM complex

Despite the benefits of Application Performance Management, the upsurge in cloud-native applications makes it more difficult to perform well as cloud-native apps produce a huge quantity of telemetry data long with added signal noise. Therefore, it interrupts the paramount events within the IT Infrastructure and application networks.

If telemetry data comes from a serverless environment, it needs to be managed and normalised as it is distinct from a database. Moreover, another problem is the velocity at which the data is generated. All these factors make it complex for traditional APM to work in a cloud-native app environment.

Related read: Explained: the fundamentals of Ethernet LAN

Boost efficiency and performance

To provide optimal application performance, application networks can work on devices used, data consumption, audiences, traffic flows, etc. It can leverage AWS/Azure cloud or office 365 to reduce operational costs while maintaining performance. 

Tata Communications application optimisation services ensure improved performance, top-notch user experience, and staff productivity. 

We ensure to offer intuitive application performance across all locations and offices. In addition, we provide a more viable network capable of offering full visibility of the entire WAN.

Ensure a seamless user experience

Certainly, the poor performance of an application can rapidly impact user experience and make users abandon the app. Thanks to Application Performance Management, which can track and manage the underlying issues before they impact the end-users. 

Tata Communications provides application visibility, performance optimisation, and application networking audit to provide a stellar experience without delays or glitches.

If you want to know more about how Tata Communications leverages APM to deliver remarkable user experience and server performance, get in touch with our digital team.