What is Application Performance Management?

Application performance management services, or APM tools are almost on par with IoT and cloud computing when it comes to transformational technology.

If you've been considering investing in APM offerings, or you've been hearing about them a lot lately, and you're wondering what they mean to your brand, the following definition will help you to make sense of things.

An Overview

Alright, let's start simple. Application Performance Management tools, or Application Performance monitoring tools (depending on who you ask) are designed to support the active and ongoing management of the availability and performance of software applications. We're living in a world where people are more reliant on applications than ever before, and APM solutions ensure that any application your business produces can deliver a consistent and reliable user experience.

Conceptually, APM means putting the experience of your end-user at the heart of your application management strategy. Usually, this process goes well with a continuous deployment methodology, or an agile environment. According to Gartner, one of the leading industry analysts for APM tools, APM solutions need to meet five core areas for functionality:

- Analytics and insights
- Component monitoring and deep-dive analysis
- User-defined profiling
- Runtime application architecture display
- End-user experience monitoring

What Do APM Solutions Do?

To put it simply, application performance management is all about giving businesses a holistic view of an application's performance. Used correctly, these tools can surface helpful insights to your business which allow you to drive significant improvements in an application's performance. After all, the only way to improve the outcomes that people get when using your applications is to monitor their results and respond to their needs.

An APM software provider can show you the reason for certain issues in your functionality too. For instance, if your Canadian customers are having slow response time problems, you might be able to see within your tools that the problem is caused by issues with your CDN provider. On the other hand, you might see that the problems are being caused by poor SQL queries which cause slow checkout times for users.

Usually, APM offerings are used within actively-developed applications that are being built and managed in-house within a company. It's rare that you would want to use these tools for third-party applications. Instead, you'll be relying on APM tools to help you generate more revenue from your own apps and tools that you sell to further customers. Given the enormous growth of the app-centric business world, with the arrival of tools like Netflix and Uber, it makes sense that going forward, more people will want to invest in the proliferation of apps in the economy.

Whether your business revolves around government services, online shopping, banking or even healthcare, there's a good chance that you'll need more apps in the years to come.

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