Application monitoring-what is it and how to make it work?
A solution for application monitoring
Application infrastructure that powers the modern enterprise can take a range of complex architectural form factors: virtualized, software-defined, hybrid and multi-cloud, on-premise, and off-site data center deployments. It’s important to keep an eye on how well the infrastructure performs, since every second of Application downtime or performance lapse can cost businesses millions of dollars in revenue opportunities.
This makes application monitoring a valuable practice and worth a deeper look. In this article, we’ll explore the broad concept of Application monitoring, covering both the business and technical aspects of network performance.
Application Monitoring
Application Monitoring collects observability data from your IT infrastructure, analyzes it, and presents it in a format understood by humans, like charts, graphs, and alerts.
Goals of Application Monitoring Tool
Here are some reasons why it is imperative to monitor our application.
- To monitor the activities of services and hosts.
- To control the performance of system elements as an application stack.
- To find the root cause of performance issues in any module/service.
- Real-time monitoring to spot errors and service failures before they make any impact. Generate an alert in case of any anomaly.
- To monitor servers, network devices, interface performance, and network link capacity.
- Provide necessary job analytics and reports.
Benefits of Application Monitoring
If you are thinking of using an application performance monitoring system in your business, this is why you should.
- Improving the security of applications and networks.
- Simplifying the implementation of continuity plans, enabling proactive (rather than reactive) risk remediation.
- Achieving and maintaining ideal application performance.
- Optimizing service availability thanks to rapid issue reporting and rapid resolutions.
- Reducing the number of surprise cloud cost leaks thanks to complete architecture visibility.
Monitoring Tool Comparison
When selecting a monitoring solution, there are several items to consider. The programming language/s it supports is one of the first factors. Cloud support, whether you need an on-site solution, and pricing are important, too.
The following are a few frequently recommended monitoring solution tools available.
Datadog
Datadog is an all-in-one monitoring service, Datadog can monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance across your stack — hybrid cloud applications, servers, databases, and applications.
Key features:
- Supports popular web frameworks.
- Utilizes machine learning to detect errors.
- Alert integrations.
- 250+ integrations (AWS, Apache, Azure, Docker, GitHub, Java, Jira, Kubernetes, Microsoft Team, etc.).
- Monitor containers, cloud instances, on-premises, and hybrid architectures.
- Customizable dashboards.
Dynatrace
The Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform uses a proprietary form of AI called Davis to discover, map, and monitor applications, microservices, container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, and IT infrastructure running in the cloud and hybrid-cloud environments and provides automated problem remediation. The Dynatrace platform provides observability of the full solution stack, simplifying cloud complexity, speeding organizations’ digital transformation and migration, and hyper-scaling to meet organization demand.
Key features
- Real-time monitoring.
- Mobile app monitoring.
- Server-side service monitoring.
- Network, process, and host monitoring.
- Cloud and virtual machine monitoring.
- Container monitoring.
- Root-cause analysis.
New Relic
New Relic is a multi-tenant APM ( application performance management) platform that gives users deep insight and analytics into every part of their environment, giving users the ability to optimize application response times, transactions, and load times. View and analyze massive amounts of data and gain actionable insights, such as root-cause analysis, distributed tracing browser-side application performance, and overall infrastructure health. New Relic offers synthetic and RUM (Real User Monitoring) options and enterprise-grade security.
Key features:
- 100+ plugins and integrations (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, MongoDB, etc.)
- Integration for Kubernetes.
- Mobile app (Android and iOS).
- Analyze business impact through multiple dashboards.
Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source system monitoring and alerting tool. Prometheus collects and stores its metrics as time series data, i.e., metrics information is stored with the timestamp at which it was recorded, alongside optional key-value pairs called labels.
Key features:
- Multi-dimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key/value pairs.
- Time series collection happens via a pull model over HTTP.
- PromQL is a flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality.
- Pushing time series data is supported via an intermediary gateway.
- Multiple types of graphing and dashboarding support.
Conclusion
An effective monitoring system will enable the company in identifying the problems from the bottom line and helps in establishing an effective control system by eliminating errors.
