Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is the key element in observability. We cannot imagine running hassle-free operation of modern applications without an APM tool. In some cases, it could even hinder your processes when you have distributed system to operate.
TL; DR Summary
- Application Performance Monitoring is the monitoring and management of the performance and availability of software applications.
- APM is the backbone of better observability.
- APM tool is necessary for all software applications to know whether my application is up and running, performing well, succeeding or not.
- Observability is the key to better operations.
- Blind spots are the most complicated things to deal with in operations. They create a lack of visibility on the performance and reliability of an application and the infrastructure.
- Poor collaboration can arise across teams without observability, particularly when components are dependent on one another Do not let your customer discover app problems first.
- SLA (service level agreement) and MTTR (mean time to resolve) are important metrics for better availability of the system.
Challenges
Blind Spots
Every piece of software will have operation blind spots. Some of these will only become apparent when resultant issues arise. These blind spots can spread across all dimensions of operations, such as performance, the reliability of the application or the infrastructure, or security among other areas. This can present problems when clients’ services are impacted and they spot the problem before the service provider does, which can cause reputational harm. Proactively monitoring for operation blind spots is vital.
SLA and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)
In all businesses, SLAs are important in ensuring the business continuity of your customer’s business. Mean time to resolve (MTTR) is the key reliability indicator to ensure the agreed SLA.
When a business doesn’t have observability practices in place, it is very difficult to reduce the MTTR as the mean time to detect (MTTD) of an incident/issue will take longer time than usual. When a business’ operations are reactive only, problems relating to a lack of visibility of application health and problem hotspots can crop up and it can be difficult to determine how the system is performing.
A matured APM process and tool will help businesses to achieve their aims. There are plenty of APM tools available in the market, so it is crucial that a business chooses the right one for their needs.
Poor/No Feedback
With no observability, businesses cannot track the health of their overall systems. Since there is no data or visibility available, the business will not be able to know what is happening currently in the system and what component or module is causing the problems. It makes IT operations and the developer’s life hard. This will have a ripple effect on cross-department collaboration.
What is Monitoring?
Monitoring provides software teams with the ability to collect data within their systems and allows them to react quickly when errors and problems occur. This enables a proactive approach where the developer or operations can quickly respond to any issue after it’s reported.
What is an APM?
Application performance monitoring (APM) is the monitoring and management of the performance and availability of software applications.
In simple terms, APM is the art of managing the performance, uptime, and user experience of software applications. APM monitors the performance at which transactions are carried out by end-users as well as by the systems and network infrastructure that support a software application, providing a comprehensive overview of bottlenecks and possible outages.
Why APM is important?
APMs can mitigate against blind spots, can reduce MTTR and thereby helping a business to achieve their SLAs and can also improve collaboration. An effective APM should also have end-to-end coverage of all the components within a system.
If an application has many components to manage, including servers, virtual machines, and hosted applications such as application servers, databases and web applications among others, a business must implement an end-to-end application performance management tool. This will help monitor application performance problems, monitor server health and availability, and plan the capacity of the resource based on requests received.
Since diagnosis is faster, troubleshooting will also be faster, which will in turn reduce the MTTR and increase the availability SLA. Above all, businesses will notice the problems and take proactive measures before impacting users.
Application Monitoring Process
The APM process starts with the instrumentation of the application and its dependent components, capturing all required for monitoring. Monitoring the system on a continuous basis helps to understand in the issues within that system, such as its health status and any other errors.
The next step is to identify every potential issue in the system and triage them to prepare the priority list and action plan. Once the order is known in which these problems are going to be tackled, businesses should begin dive deep analysis and then solve the subsequent problems one by one.
It is important to measure all changes in the system, as only then can it be understood whether the provided fixes are working properly or not. Businesses should compare the current release performance with the previous release to identify any decrease in performance or increases in error rate.
Gathering feedback at various stages and taking proactive measures to improve the system will also help.
Author: Sreenivasan Madhaiyan