The Skinny on Application Performance Monitoring

One issue you’ll have to deal with in-office is the need for capable application performance monitoring software to handle the many interlocking components that function behind the scenes of even moderately complicated systems. This is especially true when you’re in the competitive business sphere, where every mistake along the chain of developers, system admins and program testers is magnified ten-fold. At the end of the day, the consumer matters most, and will depend on the business that delivers – to the exclusion of all the others.

Application Performance Monitoring Basics

Also called APM, application performance monitoring prioritizes the speed of delivery of whatever action the end-user is taking using the company’s software. This is a very broad definition, but it covers the primary goal of the various actions the monitoring software might take – it differs from brand to brand.

Along the way, the monitoring software gathers diagnostic information on the bottlenecks caused by service interruptions, as well as other specified performance analytics. The bag of tricks that APM has available is actually akin to a programmer’s toolbox – he or she may be well-versed in Perl, Ruby and Haskell and can use the best features of each for a particular job. In this regard, APM also has tools that can discern uptime and the performance speed of the application in question. It can also be integrated with the World Wide Web to use existing tools for additional measurements.

Combating Slow Response Times: APMs Many Uses

As you’re well aware, speed is paramount in web-based applications and stand-alone software. Few things make the end-user navigate away faster than slow load and response times. If you have an online e-commerce store, for example, this tendency to navigate away will have a huge effect on how many users make it to the end of the sales funnel vs. how many made it to the landing page.

Some of the ways that APM combats this is employing automation to send pings to your network to see if it gets a response, as well as actively running tests on IP Protocols to analyze and send reports in real-time to the system administrator. As you compare the results of the analytics to pre-established thresholds, you can respond according to the data.

One such software from Stackify, named Retrace, accomplishes all of the above; it also has code-level performance capabilities and can analyze the functioning of your server. Some of the specific attributes of Retrace are tailored to e-commerce solutions; given its ability to take snapshots of transactions in code-form, so your software developers can know precisely what’s happening at the root level. In short, as a result of its many capabilities, application performance monitoring readily gives way to application performance management – all you have to do is have the most capable software on the market helping your system administrators implement the changes as needed.