Optimal application performance has become an essential part of both the customer experience and internal operations. Customer-facing applications that fail to meet user expectations are quickly abandoned, which is costly in terms of closing sales, understanding customer behavior and maintaining customer loyalty.
From an operational standpoint, performance issues with internal business applications can drag down productivity and hinder collaboration. Organizations need to maximize application performance in order to maximize their return on investments in technology and people.
These issues have become more pronounced as organizations digitize processes to meet remote work and social distancing requirements. However, distributed systems and the cloud create complexity that makes it difficult to remediate application performance issues.
Application performance management (APM) tools are evolving to address these challenges. Best-in-class APM solutions bring together performance metrics from multiple platforms and clouds to give organizations the visibility they need to ensure consistent application performance. Instead of reacting to problems, IT gains the insight needed to prevent problems from occurring. That means fewer complaints from users and customers and less time spent firefighting.
The Evolution of APM
As a discipline, APM involves monitoring applications to detect any issues that could affect the user experience. It provides the framework and tools IT needs to ensure that the delivery of critical services meets business requirements.
APM has been around since the mainframe, but it has changed dramatically. In the days of monolithic systems, performance problems could be analyzed through log files and traces. APM tools must now navigate cloud-based systems, mobile apps, containers, microservices and serverless architectures to identify performance problems.
More importantly, today’s APM tools provide visibility into application performance from the user’s perspective, measuring how quickly transactions are completed and data is delivered. When bottlenecks are discovered, APM tools trace the problem to the root cause, identify the best possible fix, and create reports for analysis.
Related to APM is application-aware network performance monitoring, which uses deep packet inspection and data analysis to show how network performance is affecting the performance of applications and services. While APM provides visibility from the user perspective, application-aware network performance monitoring provides visibility from a network perspective, thus playing a critical role in proactive management and rapid problem resolution.
Growing Demand for APM
Through performance trends analysis, IT can better understand and handle highly dynamic workloads and make smarter, more cost-effective infrastructure upgrades. APM tools also enable organizations to monitor customer behavior and provide valuable data that can be used to optimize the customer experience, reduce errors, and improve uptime and conversion rates.
The growing emphasis placed upon application performance, as well as the need to harness the power of mobility, DevOps, the cloud and big data, are driving demand for APM technology. According to data compiled by Reportlinker.com, the global market for APM is estimated at $7 billion and is forecast to reach $11.9 billion in 2027.
If your current APM tools aren’t providing the insight you need, Technologent can assess your environment to identify gaps. We can then design and implement a customized toolset and meet with you regularly to ensure that the solution continues to deliver business value.
It’s no longer enough for your applications to be working and your network to be operational. They need to be working well. Let Technologent show you how APM and application-aware network performance monitoring tools can be integrated into your environment to enhance the customer experience and boost efficiency.
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