https://www.techtarget.com/searchapparchitecture/tip/Top-application-performance-monitoring-tools
Business applications are incorporating a wider range of technologies and being distributed across a greater number of systems and geographic locations every day. In such a climate, it has become increasingly difficult to guarantee applications deliver the performance necessary to provide an optimal user experience. DevOps teams must come up with ways to ensure their applications operate at peak efficiency, and for this, they need an effective application performance monitoring tool that can see into every level of their applications, regardless of where they are and the technologies used.
Application performance monitoring (APM) refers to the process of actively monitoring an application's performance to ensure it operates at an optimal level and delivers a seamless user experience. Only through performance monitoring can DevOps teams effectively address performance issues and manage their applications.
An organization that deploys and manages applications requires an effective APM strategy to gather and quantify performance-related data from components that support the application delivery process. The teams responsible for those applications should be able to easily access information such as CPU utilization, memory demands, disk I/O speeds and application response times, as well as track error rates and the frequency an application runs into problems or fails.
Performance monitoring has grown increasingly important as applications become more distributed and complex, sometimes spanning multiple cloud environments or running in hybrid clouds. An APM strategy should not only monitor infrastructure and application components, but incorporate the ability to track business transactions, application dependencies and the overall user experience. Only then can DevOps teams see the entire application picture and get at the root causes of any issues that arise, so they can be addressed before they affect the user experience.
To implement their APM strategies, organizations need monitoring systems that can track performance over time and provide DevOps teams with the information they need to proactively address performance issues. Choosing such a tool can be difficult, but there are some basic capabilities to look for in an APM tool. Ensure that it does the following:
In addition to these capabilities, decision-makers must account for the more general characteristics of each platform. Consider the following questions:
Finally, decision-makers should evaluate the product's scalability and the security mechanisms that are in place to protect the data.
Weeding through the wide assortment of APM tools is no small task, and it can be difficult to know where to begin. To help with the process, we've provided an overview of 12 of today's top APM tools.
AppDynamics, part of Cisco, is a full-stack observability platform that incorporates extensive APM capabilities that can centralize and correlate performance analytics across the full application stack. Available as both an on-premises offering and as SaaS, AppDynamics provides end-to-end visibility into application performance and makes it possible to identify the root causes of problems in real time.
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Datadog is a SaaS-based observability platform that includes strong APM capabilities. It offers end-to-end distributed tracing that incorporates browsers, mobile apps, databases and individual lines of code. By correlating distributed traces with front-end and back-end data, Datadog APM can monitor health metrics and service dependencies, helping to reduce latency and eliminate errors.
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Dynatrace is an observability platform available as cloud-based SaaS or as an on-premises service. The platform includes advanced APM capabilities that provide intelligent observability at scale for both enterprise applications and cloud-native workloads. Dynatrace also includes an AI causation engine that, along with automation, provides deep insights into the applications and underlying infrastructure.
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Instana, an IBM company, offers Enterprise Observability Platform and an Application Performance Monitoring platform available as SaaS or self-hosted software. The platform includes fully automated APM capabilities to observe, monitor and fix applications and services. Instana uses stream processing to collect and analyze data in real time, providing immediate feedback with every application release, deployment and version.
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Loupe is a log aggregation and analytics platform available as SaaS or a self-hosted offering. The platform enables organizations to gather data about .NET and Java applications from a variety of environments, ranging from smartphones to cloud-based platforms. In addition to log data, Loupe can gather system metrics and framework-specific events.
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Applications Manager is an APM software product that offers visibility into application performance and the user experience, while providing additional insights through infrastructure monitoring. The platform isolates and resolves issues throughout the application stack, down to the code level. Applications Manager supports Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby and Node.js applications.
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New Relic is a SaaS-based observability platform that includes APM as one of its key services. Organizations can trace dependencies across their distributed applications to detect anomalies, address errors, optimize performance and improve the customer experience. The product offers visibility into the application stack, from back-end APIs to the user devices.
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Raygun APM is a SaaS server-side performance monitoring platform that provides both trend and real-time application and user experience data. The platform supports .NET, Ruby and Node.js software applications. It proactively identifies and alerts customers to performance issues. It also includes an automated issue creation engine that maintains a list of the most urgent performance concerns.
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Scout APM is a performance monitoring platform that provides proactive alerting and real-time insights into the application environment. Offered as SaaS, Scout APM provides error, database and external service monitoring, as well as basic application monitoring. Other features include deployment tracking, GitHub integration and background job monitoring.
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APM Insight is an AI-powered performance monitoring system for tracking application behavior and its effect on users in real time. APM Insight is offered as a SaaS-based product that can monitor the entire application stack, from the URL down to the database. It supports Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python and Node.js platforms and can track and optimize all transactions.
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AppOptics is a SaaS-based APM and infrastructure tool for hybrid and cloud-native IT environments. AppOptics enables organizations to visualize and troubleshoot application bottlenecks. The platform includes more than 150 out-of-the-box plugins and integrations for monitoring servers, virtual hosts and containers, with support for features such as distributed tracing, live code profiling and exception tracking.
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Stackify Retrace is an application performance management and observability platform offered as SaaS. The platform aggregates performance, log, error and metric data to provide consolidated monitoring and insights into production and preproduction environments. Retrace includes enhanced search and drill-down capabilities into server and application logs, with the ability to create customized log queries.
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21 Jul 2022