The Need for Application Performance Management and Monitoring

With digital transformation growing by leaps and bounds, there are no two ways about how efficiency has become the most significant goal of every organization. And in the quest of achieving so, performance engineering plays a crucial role at every step of an SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Be it in the very early stages of the cycle through a shift left approach or post release through the shift right approach. During the latter, APM or application performance management as well as monitoring becomes a key metric to analyze the efficiency of an application or product.

Understanding Application Performance Management and Monitoring

As a product reaches its fruition in terms of its reception by end users, performance becomes a crucial nuance to monitor. Although performance testing helps eliminate an array of performance bottlenecks during the SDLC, APM also becomes imperative post release or just before pushing it to the production environment. With APM, certain core target areas become:
End-user experience monitoring;
Runtime application architecture management and monitoring;
User defined transaction profiling, etc.

Analyzing the aforementioned areas and much more, helps in delivering a seamless user experience and eliminating any performance anomalies or defects from the application. This can be enhanced in two ways –

• Production environment – This becomes a common platform for a shift right approach and APM. Any performance anomalies post release are identified, monitored and rectified on production. But often, this can hamper a product in its entirety since a few bottlenecks can cause major disruptions on live. Thus, testing and monitoring on the production environment is crucial but not advisable everytime.
• Pre-production environment – APM via a pre-production environment becomes a more suitable option for organizations to eliminate as many performance bottlenecks as possible before going live. Be for load testing or user experience monitoring, a pre-production environment offers a larger scope than production.

Application performance management and monitoring can thus, be conducted on two conducive platforms, pre-production being a more preferred option, for identifying and mitigating performance bottlenecks to the core.

Using the right set of tools and technologies also plays a huge role in the success of APM. There are an array of commercial tools available for performance management and monitoring. However, certain open-source tools and technology stack have also come into play for expediting this process – Grafana, Telegraf or InfluxDB are just to name a few. These technologies and tools, if implemented coherently, help augment the process of performance management and monitoring.

Thus, the need and significance of application performance management and monitoring has become a given today. When it comes to performance engineering, a cohesive approach and amalgamation of both, shift left and shift right, becomes pivotal to achieve maximum efficiency. Albeit a product may do wonders when performance bottlenecks are eliminated from the very early stages of an SDLC, it would prove to be much more effective when this process is continued post release as well via APM – for rectifying and meeting end users’ expectations seamlessly.