A] Introduction
In the cloud-native and microservices-driven world, making sure that the performance of the application is smooth is not an option anymore, but it is a must. The user experience, brand reputation, and hidden performance bottlenecks may directly impact the user experience, brand reputation, and revenue streams.
This is why multiple companies are resorting to application monitoring software that provides them with real-time information on the performance of their apps. Monitoring has emerged as the foundation of contemporary DevOps practices, whether through the ability to identify anomalies or to promise scalability.
Application monitoring not only prevents problems before users are impacted, but it also enables businesses to innovate more quickly, knowing their systems can be trusted.
B] What Is Application Monitoring and Why Is It Important?
Application monitoring is an ongoing process of monitoring performance measurements, including uptime, response time, error rates, and general user experience. Simply put, it makes sure that your software performs an intended task, in a timely manner, safely and reliably.
Application performance monitoring today is not limited only to the detection of outages. It is fully integrated into DevOps pipelines and CI/CD workflows to give feedback at each deployment stage.
Monitoring provides visibility across distributed systems, whether you are carrying out a monolithic application or a microservice-based system. It equips development and operations teams with data to take action and make better decisions, minimise downtime, and maximise customer satisfaction.
As more businesses are migrating to hybrid and cloud-native infrastructures, application monitoring is becoming a crucial component in the implementation of a digital-first customer experience.
C] Top 8 Application Monitoring Tools You Should Know
Various best application monitoring tools exist to address different risks, infrastructure setups, and business objectives, and are utilised by various DevOps monitoring solutions. Here are the most widely adopted application monitoring tools and how they work:
1. New Relic
New Relic monitoring is among the first to offer full-stack observability. It provides distributed tracing, real-time error monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring. It is known to offer intuitive dashboards that enable businesses to get a profound insight into frontend and backend performance.
2. AppDynamics
AppDynamics, now owned by Cisco, specialises in matching application performance to business outcomes. It offers detailed transaction diagnostics, and it is among the best application monitoring tools used by companies that focus on customer experience and impact on revenue.
3. Datadog
Datadog APM is the most popular cloud monitoring tool and is seamlessly integrated in the multi-cloud environment. Datadog is commonly used to monitor applications in real-time and provide infrastructure insights into large, distributed systems with log management, security monitoring, and metrics visualisation.
4. Dynatrace
Dynatrace uses AI to detect anomalies and find the root cause automatically. It offers a full end-to-end web monitoring application and covers containers, Kubernetes, and hybrid clouds. It is an AI-based observability tool and one of the best APM tools used by businesses.
5. Prometheus + Grafana
Combined with the Prometheus monitoring tool, the Grafana application monitoring tool offers strong visualisation and alerting capabilities as a popular open-source APM solution. Data collection and data storage are done by Prometheus, and intuitive dashboards by Grafana. DevOps teams prefer this combination because it is a cost-effective application monitoring software.
6. Splunk APM
Splunk APM tool is a data-based tool that provides quick analytics to troubleshoot in real-time. Its tracing features allow it to be powerful in tracing end-to-end applications, especially with large enterprises dealing with complicated environments.
7. SolarWinds APM
SolarWinds is regarded as the lowest-priced company offering inexpensive software performance monitoring tools. It fits well with small- to medium-sized businesses that require application health monitoring software with robust features, but at a cost that isn’t enormous.
8. Elastic APM
Elastic APM is an element of Elastic Stack, which provides lightweight, scalable application monitoring software. It can be easily combined with Elasticsearch and Kibana, and this is why it can be recommended to developers who want to find open-source tools to monitor applications in real time.
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D] Key Features to Look for in Monitoring Tools
APM tools are not made equal. It is essential to consider more than just basic performance tracking features when deciding which one suits your business. Find solutions that provide:
- On-the-fly monitoring of application performance over distributed systems.
- AI/ML-driven root cause analysis to troubleshoot more quickly.
- Full integration with CI/CD continuous delivery pipelines.
E] Case Study: LinkedIn Application monitoring
LinkedIn has a base of more than 900 million users and cannot afford downtime or unhappy customers. LinkedIn is a company that uses a combination of open-source and enterprise applications monitoring tools to ensure reliability, such as Apache Kafka to stream the events and the open-source APM tools to monitor the processes in real time.
LinkedIn has lowered the incidences of downtime and has enhanced the resilience of its systems by deploying enterprise application monitoring tools. The tools assist the engineering teams in detecting bottlenecks, tracking distributed microservices, and maintaining constant connectivity to the global users.
The proactive approach to monitoring adopted by LinkedIn emphasises the significance of sophisticated DevOps automation solutions in the management of scalable applications.
F] Challenges in Application Monitoring
Businesses have a number of monitoring challenges, even with powerful tools.
Teams are often overwhelmed with nonstop notifications, leading to widespread alert fatigue, and it becomes difficult to identify genuine problems. Scaling storage and analytics pipelines is overwhelmed by large volumes of substitute logs and performance data across distributed systems. The complexity of integration also presents itself in a microservices environment, where dozens of tools and services need to coordinate with each other. Also, the high cost of the best APM tools may constrain their use by smaller organisations.
These hurdles can be overcome by selecting the appropriate application monitoring software that is both functional and easy to use, and affordable.
G] Future Trends in Application Monitoring
The future of application monitoring tools is to implement application observability. Observability does not rely on metrics alone, but supplements them with logs, traces, and live data on how a system functions. AI-enabled predictive monitoring, combined with DevOps automation solutions, will become the norm, enabling businesses to identify anomalies before they escalate out of control.
As organisations are moving to multi-cloud and hybrid environments, cloud monitoring tools, along with enterprise application monitoring for enabling cross-environment visibility, will rule.
H] Final Thoughts
To achieve reliability, customer trust, and long-term business development, it is necessary to invest in the appropriate application monitoring tools. Businesses now have more options than ever before, with both open-source frameworks, such as Prometheus and Grafana, and also enterprise solutions, such as Dynatrace and Datadog.
Our team simplifies the way organisations apply these tools at Siddhatech and applies DevOps monitoring solutions to bring performance, resilience, and scale. Contact us today to learn more.
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Frequently Asked Questions
The more popular options are Datadog APM, New Relic monitoring, and Dynatrace, which are commonly used as software performance monitoring tools on cloud-native platforms.
Application monitoring tools gather statistics, such as uptimes, latencies, and errors, and use dashboards and alerts to facilitate real-time application monitoring and proactive troubleshooting.
Applications, such as the Prometheus monitoring tool with Grafana application monitoring, and Elastic APM, are the best APM software to use when you have containerised applications.
Application health monitoring and end-to-end application monitoring solutions allow you to track performance and receive alerts on performance tracking dashboards. Datadog and Splunk cloud monitoring tools are also really good at this.
APM tools are used as performance monitoring tools, error detection monitoring tools, and software deployment monitoring tools across the environments.