Application Performance Monitoring

Application Performance Monitoring is an essential aspect of project management for ensuring reliable, satisfying and consistent usage of applications in a digital environment. It provides performance and utilization insights of applications, identifying potential problems before they impact userbase.

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What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application Performance Monitoring is the process of monitoring and managing the performance of your digital product. It involves tracking and analyzing key performance metrics, such as request response times, resource utilization, and error rates, to identify potential issues that can impact user experience.

The primary goal of monitoring is to ensure that applications are running optimal to cost and performance aspects and meeting user expectations. It provides visibility to the User Interaction by tracking User Behavior, logging request metadata, logs of errors and exceptions at User end and Server end and so on.

Why bother?

Businesses today are traversing opportunities to minimize cost and maximize profits. One adoption is digital tech for multiple use cases such as CRM, ERP, Track and Trace, eCommerce etc. They enable organizations to deliver services to customers, streamline operations, and increase efficiency. However, the performance of applications can impact the user experience and, ultimately, the success of the product.

A detailed view on the requirement of a monitoring system for businesses:

1. Identify issues and Improve UX: Provides insights into the runtime behavior of applications, identifying errors and exceptions that can impact the user experience. Ex. When you eCart is loaded with unintended items at checkout. Could be a User application-level error.
2. Reduce Downtime: Helps organizations identify and address performance issues before they cause downtime. This minimizes the impact on users and reduces the risk of lost revenue and reputational damage. Ex. Exam results published by universities, the peak utilization would be for login and forgot password pages.
3. Optimize Performance: Enables organizations to identify bottlenecks of application, improving resource utilization, and reducing costs. Ex. Adding items to Cart is simple UI implementation, but your backend might get repetitive APi calls to add items to the cart. If the query is slow running it might end up as a bottleneck.
4. Identify Trends: APM provides data on application performance over time, enabling organizations to identify trends and patterns. This can help organizations anticipate future issues and proactively address them. Ex. What are the general purchase patterns in an ecommerce site. Users prefer purchasing in the evenings.
5. Measure ROI: Provides data on the impact of performance improvements, enabling organizations to measure the ROI of their Performance improvement investments. Ex. Usage of monitoring tools are costlier since it itself utilizes resources to collect data and present to admins. Which incurs a cost, issued by the service provider.

How does monitoring work?

It works by monitoring the performance of applications in near real-time. It collects data on key performance metrics, such as response times, resource utilization (CPU, Memory etc.), and errors, and provides insights into the performance of applications.

Tools use a variety of techniques to monitor application performance, including:

1. Instrumentation: APM tools instrument applications with code that collects performance data, such as response times and resource utilization. Ex. Azure provides Azure Monitor to capture system metrics.
2. Tracing: APM tools trace transactions through applications, providing insights into the performance of each component. Ex. Application Insights traces in Azure helps collate and query on request response or rendering times/performance.
3. Log Analysis: APM tools analyze application logs to identify potential issues that can impact performance. Ex. Application Insights collects data such as requests made to the app and a bundle of child transactions involved, like and SQL statement and other API calls.
4. Synthetic Monitoring: APM tools simulate user transactions to test application performance and identify potential issues.
5. Real User Monitoring: APM tools monitor the performance of applications from the perspective of end-users, providing insights into user experience. Ex. Azure has provided SDK for Application Insights to be implemented in various frameworks and languages, for tracking real user behavior.

Conclusion

Monitoring adds control over the product. Depending on ROI, it can be scaled for better User satisfaction and experience, directly impacting growth of the product.