Speed is everything in the modern digital economy, especially for websites and applications accessed by your end users. Slow processes have a direct negative impact on the productivity of your business, its profits, and even your brand. Moreover, if your business application experiences errors or loads slowly, it translates to a loss of business as customers go to your competitor.
In order to ensure that the above scenarios don’t occur, it’s pertinent that you employ an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) strategy. APM involves monitoring and tracking your business applications and user experience performance on a continuous basis. In order to create the ideal APM strategy for your business, it needs to have the following aspects.
1. Transaction profiling
One critical component to consider while creating your APM strategy is the transaction profiling process. This involves byte-code implementation during your application’s runtime and analysis of the transaction flow between different tiers of the application to identify where slowness is occurring.
This means utilizing a tag and follow approach of each business transaction. Transactions are therefore traceable from your application front end, to the middle processes, and finally to process backend database.
2. Deep-dive application analysis
In some instances, a problem in the application infrastructure can frequently throw errors whenever you run it. For instance, your enterprise log management system may have identified insufficient heap memory or other application problems that are affecting application performance. A detailed visibility of your application’s infrastructure is a requirement.
3. Monitoring a digital user’s experience
Monitoring the application user experience as well as identifying time when they experience downtime, slowness, or errors is another critical APM component. Staying vigilant with your users’ experiences will help you figure out flaws in your application. This is possible via app analytics tools, reviews and ratings, in-app feedback, understanding customer demographics, and session tracking.
If you want your application to have a better business impact, consider delving deeper into data analytics and keeping a close eye on what is happening with your application and users. Implementing effective ways of measuring user experience will go a long way in making your application useful.
4. Track code-level diagnostics
Once transaction tracing reveals that the cause of application slowness is in the server, a developer needs to find out if the issue is with the code. In fact, 43 percent of application performance problems are due to application code issues.
Through transaction profiling, developers and application owners can delve deep into the code for a breakdown of a precise process. If the user is experiencing slow transactions, it is possible to find the exact code line, third-party call, or even database query that’s taking much of the processing time.
5. Better infrastructure visibility
Most application issues are due to a server memory leak, storage hotspots, virtualization bottlenecks, slow network connectivity and others. Monitoring your application’s supporting infrastructure is critical to ensuring its success, in terms of performance. Monitoring the infrastructure should be a part of application monitoring, and an imperative component of any APM strategy.
Why is your application slow?
In order to answer this question, it’s critical you collect insight into all application aspects in regards to business transaction, infrastructure health, user experience, and application performance. Adopt a congregated infrastructure and application monitoring strategy to automate diagnosing root causes as well as simplifying performance troubleshooting steps. From a single window on your computer screen, it becomes easy to dig out true information from your sources, easily pinpoint issues, and ensure high performance your business applications.
Once you know how to do it right, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a breeze. Try the strategy and experience the benefits of having a converged application and infrastructure monitoring solution.