LAUNCH & MONITOR

What is APM and why is it important?

In short, APM is the practice of proactively monitoring the many facets of an application environment in order to identify and mitigate issues before they become major problems. Across the typically complex and distributed ecosystems of today’s applications, we can think of APM as our guide in finding the needle (or needles) in a digital haystack that spans multiple locations, across various types of technology.

But why do we need APM, specifically?

Let’s look at a few key APM benefits and the role they play in solving performance problems.

Benefit #1: APM breaks down operational silos.

APM provides a unified view across your entire application stack, including every component, connection point, dependency, and user interaction.

This benefits the different teams supporting your application by equipping them with comprehensive visibility, which allows them to collaborate in a way that would be virtually impossible without APM. This is particularly important in the highly distributed, multi-cloud environments that support so many modern applications today.

Benefit #2: APM allows you to meet — and exceed — customer expectations.

As we discussed earlier, when an application experiences performance issues, or is unavailable, you run the risk of losing customers. APM provides real-time performance insights that allow you to react fast when issues arise, including contextual data that helps you reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) and restore your application to normal performance.

By proactively resolving issues, you’re better able to provide that flawless experience your customers expect from your applications.

Benefit #3: APM protects your company’s bottom line.

More sophisticated APM solutions provide business intelligence analytics, which can help you visualize and understand how application performance issues impact your mission-critical business metrics — revenue or sales conversions, for example.

This not only helps better align IT with the business, but it also helps technologists prioritize issue remediation’s by focusing on resolving the problems that directly impact key business outcomes.

What’s important in the world of APM going forward?

APM solutions are continually evolving to meet the demands of the rapidly changing technologies we use to build applications. At the time of writing, we’re on the cusp of a major shift that will bring APM to the next stage of its evolution. The two driving forces behind this shift are observability and Open Telemetry, which, at a high-level, can be considered to go hand in hand.

Observability has a pretty fluid definition, but in general, you can think of it as APM on steroids. Driven by the advanced needs of DevOps and SRE teams, observability provides the raw, granular data necessary to gain an in-depth understanding of complex and highly distributed systems — typically defined as M.E.L.T. (metrics, events, logs and traces). This fine-grained understanding of how applications and systems should work will help you further reduce MTTR when issues arise.

Sounds great, right? But it’s extremely challenging to get the correlated M.E.L.T data needed to make this a reality. Enter Open Telemetry. Open Telemetry is a vendor-neutral standard for collecting telemetry data for applications, their supporting infrastructures, and services, providing the consistent collection mechanism and format needed to understand and validate performance across the most complex of distributed applications.

While observability and Open Telemetry are still in their infancy, they’re both a testament to the industry’s ongoing efforts to simplify complexity and ensure applications are always driving better digital experiences and business outcomes. Be on the lookout for developments in this space.