APM is software that collects the various metrics data from your application and tells you what’s going on within your application. Metrics data can be anything, including transactions, analytics, availability, logs scrapping, which are presented in a beautiful dashboard. APM can store the historical data and show you the real-time metrics of web applications, infrastructure, mobile applications, etc. There are two types of APM you can find. Traditional APM – software installed in your premises to monitor & manage an application, infrastructure within your network/data center. Cloud APM – you don’t need to buy the software; instead, you use the APM provider cloud instance to configure and monitor your applications. If your application is running on a cloud platform, AWS, Google, Azure, etc., cloud APM would be a good choice. Cloud APM is also cheaper compare to a traditional one because you save your infrastructure cost. There are multiple cloud APM product providers available in the market, and here are some of the best ones.
Elastic Observability
Elastic observability is part of Elastic Cloud.
With Elastic Observability, you can leverage unified visibility through detailed metrics, APM traces, and logs in the same stack. This way, you can easily monitor events occurring in your ecosystem and react accordingly. Elastic Security offers superior protection and integrates with endpoint security and Elastic SIEM to detect, prevent, and respond to online threats. Its Elastic Stack consists of Kibana, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Beats so that you can take data from anywhere. You can then visualize and analyze in real-time. Configuring and deploying Elastic Cloud is effortless. In addition, it also facilitates easy scaling, optimized architecture, and custom plugins. They provide regular backups by restoring your data and keeping snapshots. Are you interested in learning Elasticsearch? Check out this guide.
Instana
Maximize the application performance with contextualized observability data using Instana. It allows you to deploy, discover, monitor, and map each application’s dependencies automatically. Improve the performance through contextual information and resolve the issues with intelligent actions. The platform allows DevOps teams to quickly get the root cause of issues, end-user impact, or service degradation. See all anomalous events and analyze every data in actual time, allowing incoming data actionable immediately and resolve issues faster.
Its Dynamic Graph models and records relationships between every entity, giving users the knowledge of each inter-dependencies and differentiating what is not running or running at a point in time. Instana’s Context Guide allows you to navigate with the help of Graph so that each user, from DevOps and Dev to business executives, knows the impact of every service. Filter out the noise and cut millions of metrics to understand the one that impacts YOUR code, applications, and services. Instana’s Dependency Map highlights all application dependencies and services. It allows you to understand how all the application components are related to each other to learn the downstream and upstream impacts. Get the tool at the price of $75 or start a FREE trial.
Google Operations
Google Cloud’s Operations suite monitors application performance, troubleshoots, and improves it on the Google Cloud environment. It can collect logs, traces, and metrics across your applications and Google Cloud. Use the built-in dashboards to view and monitor the applications and platforms. In addition, you can perform queries and analyze your data. You can also set up availability and performance indicators and notifications and alerts with the existing systems. Cloud Logging performs at scale and ingests log data from VMs, GKE environments, and Google Cloud services. It allows you to analyze the logs and improve application troubleshooting. Plus, Cloud Monitoring shows the overall health, uptime, and performance of cloud-powered apps.
APM combines troubleshooting, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Logging capabilities with Debugger, Profiler, and Cloud Trace to reduce cost and latency. Reduce MTTR and maximize the application’s performance with the help of cloud ops tools. Use dashboards to get insights into the applications with custom application metrics and services. You can also manage your logs easily with the help of log routers. Furthermore, manage your security through Cloud Audit Logs. Integrate with different ecosystems to enhance security, compliance capabilities, and IT ops. Get started for FREE and pay for different inbuilt tools, whichever you need to monitor and secure your application.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace is one of the industry leaders in providing full-stack monitoring & management solutions for application & infrastructure from a cloud.
Dynatrace APM monitors end-to-end user experience, transaction, performance and provides deep insights into your application stack in real-time. With a single APM agent, you can monitor cloud infrastructure & application performance. Example
AWS Microsoft Azure Docker Tomcat WebLogic/WebSphere Nginx/IIS/Apache Oracle/MSSQL/MongoDB
You can get it started with Dynatrace in less than five minutes. They offer 15 days FREE trial.
New Relic
New Relic APM supports a large number of application environments to monitor and error reporting.
Java js PHP .NET Ruby
With the help of New Relic, you get in-depth performance metrics of your application in real-time. Some of the top features of New Relic APM are: Application Monitoring – monitoring everything you need to understand the application performance & capacity. For ex:
How much time take to load the page? What is the most time-consuming transaction? What is the throughput and error rate? Monitor critical transactions with breakdown and traceback
New Relic also lets you deploy your application and compare the performance before and after. This becomes handy if you need to find out if the latest production deployment is causing any issue. You can do thread profiling along with the monitoring and use a Java performance analyzer for performance-related troubleshooting. Database Monitoring – most likely, you will be using some database with your enterprise application, and you can do following out of the box with New Relic.
Track the slow running queries How much time is spent on database requests? Visualize database operation Database call response time & throughput
Alerting – alerting is essential for a production environment. With the help of New Relic, you can configure the alert policies to notify when a threshold is breached. You can integrate alerting with the channel such as email, Jira, Pager Duty, etc.
You may sign-up for the New Relic trial to see how it works.
App Dynamics
App Dynamics, now part of Cisco, provide APM as SaaS (software-as-a-service) to discover, monitor, troubleshoot, and more. App Dynamics APM supports many platforms, including Java, Node.js, Apache HTTP, Python, PHP. If you are managing Java-based applications, then App Dynamics can automatically discover JVM and its dependency.
Troubleshooting becomes easier as App Dynamics isolate the performance-related issue between infrastructure and code. You get the exact problematic line of code, SQL query, and thread for faster resolution. Unique to Java, it supports almost all the popular applications, frameworks and provides full JVM health & performance management.
IBM WebSphere, Oracle Weblogic Tomcat, Jboss, Spring, Jetty, Struts, Grails
App Dynamics offer 15 days trial without providing credit card info.
Datadog
Datadog provides next-generation APM to end-to-end application performance management. It monitors full-stack, including application & infrastructure, to provide visibility at each layer of the stack. The powerful auto-instrumentation feature let you automatically track requests across many library & frameworks. Datadog provides an advanced dashboard for visualizing the metrics that matter to you. For ex;
Latency Errors per second Hits per second CPU/Memory utilization
You can monitor cloud-based applications, premises, and hybrid – everything in one place. You can get it started in FREE to experience Datadog next-generation APM.
Monitis
Monitis, a TeamViewer company, offer all-in-one application monitoring, and pricing is based on what you want to monitor.
Real user monitoring (RUM) – see how users interact with your application, including analytics.
Website – monitor uptime, full page load, transaction & also you can perform stress testing. Server- Monitor CPU, memory, network bandwidth, storage, WAN links, TCP protocol, etc. Application – get an insight into deployed applications,s including Tomcat, Node.js, Java/JMX, MySQL, etc. Mail – end-to-end monitoring for SMTP, IMAP, POP3 & ERT
Monitis provides real-time views, an interactive chart, report, and monitoring history data is stored for two years.
Scout App
Send incident status automatically for any failure with Scout App APM. Scout App integrates with Github and lets you know which developer’s code is slowing down the web application experience. Scout App analyzes the stack frame to find out memory bloat, expensive SQL statement, poor performance objects, and show that in the dashboard.
Performance comparison becomes handy with Scout App when you need to find out if the issue is after some release, configuration changes, etc. It supports Ruby, NodeJS, Python, PHP, and Elixir-based applications.
Conclusion
The above-listed SaaS-based APM should help you to get full application insight on availability & performance. Most of them offer a trial for around 15 days, so go ahead and give it a try to see what works for you. Alternatively, if you are tight on budget or looking for a self-hosted solution, then check out these open-source APM.
