Have you wondered why application performance monitoring tools are essential? Well, continue with this write-up to know more about APM tools and their uses.

Application Performance monitoring is essential for ensuring that your software works appropriately and continues. Performance monitor tools can alert you when things are going wrong so you can take action and prevent users from having an inferior experience with your software.

The right APM tools will also allow you to track performance trends over time and see bottlenecks in your code, which is especially important if you’re working in a team or as part of a larger organization.

What’s more, these tools are pretty affordable, which means that every company should be able to afford them.

Whether you’re just starting with APM or looking for ways to improve your current setup, this article will help you understand what APM is and how these tools can help you.

What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application performance monitoring or APM is a software testing method that allows organizations to monitor their software as it’s being used in the wild. With APM, you can monitor your application’s performance and make the tweaks necessary to ensure that users get a constantly high-quality experience.

APM is essential for DevOps and can be used for mobile and web application development and IT operations. With APM, you can identify performance bottlenecks on your application and take the necessary steps to mitigate those bottlenecks.

For example- your APM tool might warn you if it notices that a particular function takes a long time to execute. You can then go into the code and identify why the processes take a long time to complete. You can also use APM tools to determine when a particular user or group has a bad experience with your software. This way, you can take action to resolve the issue and prevent it from happening again.

However, you might be thinking about what benefits can be achieved while using these APM tools. Thus, In order to make it clear, you can analyze the benefits of using application monitoring tools.

Benefits of Application Performance Monitoring Tools

The APM digest lists the top 10 advantages of using APM software. Based on the customer’s priorities, a subjective evaluation is made. You’ll benefit; it satisfies customers or users.

• Increase customer satisfaction
• Improve end-user experience
• Become more objective
• Reduce downtime
• Advance productivity
• Speed up innovation
• Improve Google ranking
• Cut down costs on experts
• Lower operating cost
• Boost sales and revenue

Now, Let’s dive in to look for the top 10 APM tools to know-

The Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring Tools

In order to mention the top 10 APM tools, you can find the most popular Web and Mobile application monitoring tools.

New Relic

New Relic is the world’s most widely used APM tool, with 8,50,000 users. It offers many features, including application performance monitoring, tracing, and log analytics. One of New Relic’s most significant selling points is its ease of use. Its interface is clean and intuitive, making it an excellent tool for beginners and veterans.

Core Features Of New Relic-

• New Relic APM is a comprehensive monitoring tool that gives you insights into the performance of your applications.
• It helps to identify and diagnose performance issues and provides you with the tools you need to fix them.
• Cloud-based (SaaS only)
• It includes detailed information about your application’s resources, such as CPU and memory storage.
• Languages: Python, Nodejs, .NET, Java, Ruby, Go, PHP
• New Relic APM is easy to use and has a user-friendly interface.
• It is a cost-effective tool; you can get started with a free trial.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is another widely used application performance monitoring tool, with over 3,00,000 customers in over 100 countries. One of Dynatrace's most significant advantages is its flexibility. You can use it to monitor applications on the cloud, virtual machines, or on-premises. It’s also available as a SaaS solution, so you don’t have to worry about managing the software or hardware it runs on. Dynatrace is also highly customizable to tailor it to your needs.

Core Features of Dynatrace-

• Dynatrace provides comprehensive application performance monitoring or management capabilities in a single platform, from the data center to the cloud.
• It offers synthetic monitoring of user transactions and real-time application and database performance analysis.
• Dynatrace also provides application discovery, code-level diagnostics, and automatic problem detection and correction.
• The tool is easy to use and offers a variety of features that can be customized to meet an organization’s specific needs.
• Languages: .NET, Java

AppNeta

With AppNeta 4-dimensional monitoring, customers can quickly complex network issues so that employees can return to revenue-generating business-critical tasks. AppNeta is a good choice if you’re looking for an easy application performance monitoring tool to set up and use. It also offers a free plan, a nice bonus for startups. AppNeta interface is initiative and easy to use. It also provides a ton of helpful visualization and graphs, which can help you understand your application performance in new and illuminating ways.

Core Features of AppNeta-

• It can monitor any application on any device, including customized applications.
• AppNeta also has an API for integration with other systems to provide a more in-depth view of your network performance and usage patterns.
• Get active, continuous measurements of the performance, availability, and network health.
• It helps ensure you have the information necessary to identify what is causing performance problems

Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is another SaaS-based application performance monitoring tool that’s super easy to use. Its interface is clean and intuitive, so you shouldn’t have trouble getting started. Sumo Logic is a great option if you’re starting with APM or want to test a new tool. You also get the added advantage of being able to analyze your application’s logs and other data with ease.

Core Features of Sumo Logic-

• Sumo Logic APM provides real-time visibility into the performance of your web and mobile applications.
• It offers comprehensive, end-to-end coverage of your application stack, from the front end to the back end.
• Sumo Logic APM provides detailed performance insights to help you quickly identify and resolve issues.
• It also offers built-in anomaly detection capabilities that alert you to potential problems before they impact your application users.

Scout APM

Scout APM delivers an exemplary APM for Ruby on Rails. Nevertheless, it needs expansions into its "Server Monitoring" and "DevTrace" offerings for a comprehensively rounded resolution. The absence of other functional languages makes this APM product somewhat niche.

Core Features of Scout-

• Languages: Ruby on Rails
• Memory Leak Detection
• Slow Database Query Analysis
• GitHub Integration
• Automatic Dependencies Population

Opsview

Software company Opsview was established in 2005 and had its main office in Reading, England. It has offices in Woburn, Massachusetts, which is in the United States. An integrated view of the complete infrastructure and the functionality of business applications is offered by Opsview Application Monitoring solutions.
Gathering performance data and displaying it in a single context is exceedingly difficult in the age of digital technology because numerous apps are installed at various locations.

Core Features-

• Opsview monitors the application's health and issues notifications when something is out of the ordinary before the end user is harmed.
• It monitors storage metrics, connectivity to the client, and database availability.
• Business-critical applications' SLAs are met thanks to Opsview.
• It functions with more Opsview products, including Opsview Mobile.

AppDynamics

The AppDynamics APM tool is software that monitors the performance of applications and provides insights. It collects data from the application to identify issues with performance or errors. It then provides insights on how to fix them.

The AppDynamics APM tool is mainly used by developers who want to optimize their applications for better performance and visibility.

Core Features of AppDynamics-

The AppDynamic APM tool is an enterprise-grade application monitoring and analytics platform which includes features like:-

• Application performance monitoring- It diagnoses the application problems and detects application performance.
• Application Intelligence- The tool provides insights into resolving these problems by understanding the root cause of errors, identifying trends, and correlating events across multiple systems.
• Application Visibility- The tool delivers real-time visibility into every transaction running on the app through its live streaming capabilities.
• Language- Java, Node.js, PHP, .NET, Python, C++, etc.

Stackify Retrace

Stackify Retrace APM tool is an all-in-one solution for monitoring, diagnosing, and troubleshooting software performance in production environments. Stackify Retrace is a powerful and affordable SaaS application performance management tool that helps developers to monitor application performance and reduce downtime.

Core Features of Stackify Retrace-

• Monitoring applications in real-time.
• Alerts and notifications on various issues.
• Mobile app performance monitoring.
• Serverless environment monitoring.
• Integration with third-party tools.
• Languages: .NET, .NET Core, Java.

Datadog

Datadog is a powerful and robust monitoring solution that provides visibility into the performance of your entire infrastructure. The Datadog APM tool is a complete solution for monitoring and analyzing the performance of your application. It can collect metrics from every part of your application and put them in one place.

Core Features-

• Monitoring for all components of your infrastructure, from applications to containers to serverless functions.
• Detailed insights into application performance, including end-user experience and the impact on business metrics.
• Customizable dashboard with real-time dashboards and customizable widgets for drilling down into specific data points.
• Alerts integrate with Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, and other third-party alerting services.

Sematext APM

Sematext APM is a monitoring solution for DevOps teams that provides insights into the behavior of software applications and the performance of IT infrastructure. It is a scalable, easy-to-use, open-source solution that both small and large companies can use.

Core Features-

• Real-time interactions between applications, databases, and external services are visible.
• Real-time altering finds anomalies sooner before they affect the end user.
• Identify performance problems caused at the code level to shorten the mean time to resolution (MTTR).
• Ability to monitor and filter database operations and slow SQL to find the transactions that take the longest.
• Inter-component communication and their throughput, latency, error rates, etc., are displayed by Sematext.

Atatus

Atatus is a cloud-based performance monitoring and error-tracking solution for web applications. It helps developers track and debug issues in real-time, ensuring that their applications run smoothly and efficiently.

With Atatus, developers can monitor the performance of their web applications, including page load times, server response times, and database query times. They can also track and report errors as they occur, providing detailed information about the error and its root cause.

• Track the frequency and types of errors that are occurring and can help developers identify and fix issues affecting the application's performance or reliability.
• Collects data from users' devices and browsers as they interact with the application or website and includes information about the performance and behaviour of the website, such as page load times, server response times, and error rates.
• Infrastructure monitoring can help prevent downtime and other issues that can affect the performance and availability of an application or service.
• Developers can track log messages in real time, improving their ability to debug and troubleshoot problems.
• Allows developers to create and run automated tests to monitor the availability and performance of their web applications.
• Define custom alerts triggered when certain conditions are met, for example, when performance degrades or errors occur.

Conclusion

Application performance monitoring is crucial for maintaining a high-quality user experience. The 10 APM tools listed above are some of the best options available. Before choosing an APM tool, evaluate it based on functionality, ease of use, and features.