The main purpose of APM monitoring is simple: you use the scientific method to see if your solution works.

Modern commerce is increasingly done online, meaning APM is what makes or breaks the bottom line. A good example here would be the food delivery service Glovo. Here’s what they do when they enter a new market:

• Launch restaurant and grocery delivery at a subsidised rate
• Use local pricing and early order analytics to define minimum order value
• Introduce a free delivery subscription to secure recurring revenue
• Stop subsidising delivery fees
• Raise delivery fees and minimum order value as bearable by customers

All these decisions help Glovo offset the thin and negative margins common for lifestyle-altering tech companies. All these decisions would not be possible without a solid application performance monitoring process. You need to know that your users decide not to order their favourite taco exactly the moment they see a new surcharge.

The technical aspect affects the bottom line as well. Network application performance monitoring is essential to see whether users of your online-minded software are having a good time. Glovo is once again a good example here. In April 2022, some sort of a caching problem or backend error made item cards load for up to several minutes at a time. Good performance monitoring alongside modern SaaS software testing helps spot such problems and solve them before too many users leave for an alternative app.

Components of APM

The renowned research firm Gartner provides five main components of application performance monitoring.

• End-user experience collects and processes performance data to see issues and bottlenecks that conflict with system requirements. It is also useful for adjusting these requirements if things work well on the technical side, but users won’t sign up / pay. Experts usually combine using bots to automatically go through the app and reviewing how the same steps went for real users.

• Runtime application architecture covers hardware and software components as well as their interaction. Your engineers can automatically spot anomalies to recognise costly issues early.

• User-defined transaction profiling further explores the actual customer experience. It reproduces specific actions that lead to a performance issue so the cause can be isolated and resolved.

• Component monitoring gives extra insight into the state of individual components observed in runtime application architecture monitoring. It lets you know when some server is out of order or is perhaps missing a critical operating system update.

• Analytics & reporting give your marketing, sales, product, and management people actionable insights to achieve or increase financial success.

As for the process, these days, it is very straightforward. You simply purchase an all-in-one application performance monitoring tool and let your talented engineers do the magic. Google, Microsoft, and Dell all have their APM solutions, and there are also some specialised players in this field like Red Hat and Splunk.

Find here some tips on how to make the most out of application performance monitoring. What would you add to those tips?

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