A beginner's guide to application monitoring

In today’s fast-paced digital world, users have high expectations when it comes to application performance and availability. If an application is slow or frequently crashes, users are likely to switch to a competitor’s product. With numerous interconnected services supporting their application stack, it can be challenging for IT administrators to identify and resolve performance issues.

As technology continues to advance and applications become more intricate, it has become imperative for businesses to implement application monitoring in order to remain competitive and satisfy user demands. If you take a large e-commerce platform as an example, monitoring ensures high availability during peak traffic events like Black Friday sales by dynamically scaling resources.

What is application monitoring?

Application monitoring is an essential aspect of software development and IT operations that prioritizes the performance, availability, and user satisfaction of applications. It involves closely monitoring and evaluating an application's performance to ensure it is functioning as intended. By continuously tracking data on key metrics like response time, error frequency, and resource utilization, it can pinpoint potential bottlenecks and areas for improvement, allowing proactive measures to be taken to enhance the overall application's performance. This enables developers to quickly identify and resolve any problems that may arise in the application, ensuring a seamless and effective user experience.

Why is application monitoring necessary?

With the rapid advancement of technology and the ever-increasing demands of customers, businesses are now adopting microservices and cloud-native architectures to enhance application efficiency and stay ahead of the competition. This approach involves breaking down application components into smaller, independent services and leveraging distributed platforms like containers, virtual machines, serverless systems, and cloud-based applications. By doing so, companies can easily scale their services and mitigate the effects of technological disruptions on their daily operations, revenue, and reputation.

In order to guarantee high performance for applications, it is important to obtain comprehensive insight into various elements, spanning from the user-facing interface to the underlying infrastructure. This constant monitoring and analysis enables prompt detection and resolution of potential issues, ensuring a seamless digital journey for end-users. Given the intricate and ever-evolving nature of modern applications, application monitoring plays a vital role in maintaining their peak performance. This is crucial as applications often serve as the face of a brand. Without the aid of a robust application monitoring solution, troubleshooting and resolving problems can become difficult, resulting in a subpar user experience. Additionally, it can lead to cost savings, as well as increased revenue and sales.

With the help of proactive real-time monitoring and advanced alerting capabilities, application monitoring solutions provide a comprehensive view of both front-end and back-end performance metrics. This enables administrators to easily pinpoint and address any potential issues, ensuring smooth and efficient operation of their applications.

What are the benefits of application monitoring?

For organizations with a complex infrastructure, implementing a robust application monitoring solution is crucial for effective application performance management. Hereare some benefits of application monitoring:

• Faster incident resolution: Real-time application monitoring enables developers to swiftly identify and address any performance or availability issues before they have a chance to impact the end-users. This proactive approach minimizes any possible application crashes and guarantees a seamless and satisfactory user experience. For example, a bank can resolve slow ATM processing by pinpointing server load imbalances within seconds.
• Enhanced application performance: Application monitoring helps in ensuring that the application is performing at its best and is always available to users. It provides insights into the application’s response time, uptime, and other critical metrics, allowing developers to make necessary improvements and optimizations. It helps in understanding application usage patterns, leading to better resource allocation.
• Proactive maintenance: Proactive monitoring of application performance and usage trends enables developers to pinpoint areas for enhancement and implement necessary updates before they escalate into significant problems. This proactive approach minimizes the risk of unexpected outages and guarantees that the application is always up-to-date with the most advanced features and security patches.
• Increased user satisfaction: With application monitoring, developers can obtain valuable insights on how users are interacting with the application. This allows them to track user behavior, identify pain points, and implement necessary improvements to elevate the overall user experience. For instance, a ride-hailing app can track driver matching times to improve booking efficiency during peak hours. Not only does this result in increased user satisfaction, but it also aids in customer retention and provides a competitive advantage.
• Cost savings: Through proactive identification and resolution of performance issues, application monitoring plays a crucial role in minimizing downtime and potential loss of revenue. This empowers developers to efficiently utilize resources and infrastructure, based on usage patterns, resulting in significant cost savings over time.

Types of application monitoring

There are various types of application monitoring that can be implemented depending on the specific needs and requirements of an organization.

Challenges in application monitoring

Despite the significance and the value it offers, application monitoring does have its own set of challenges. Regardless of whether you have devised the most well-prepared strategy to monitor your application performance or not, one is most likely to face a unique set of challenges in their production environments. Following are some of the challenges observed in application monitoring:

• Complexity of modern infrastructure: As microservices and cloud-based infrastructures become increasingly prevalent, managing the factors that impact your application's efficiency can become a daunting task, especially when your system includes a combination of hybrid or distributed elements.
• Multitude of metrics: The scope of application monitoring spans a broad spectrum of IT infrastructure, encompassing a diverse range of metrics that necessitate continuous monitoring, for which, keeping a vigilant eye on all of those metrics can be quite demanding.
• Distribution of data: Effectively handling and analyzing performance data from multiple sources can be a challenging task, especially when dealing with an intricate infrastructure of hybrid or microservices applications.
• Performance blind spots: When deploying hybrid and microservice applications, coordinating performance monitoring steps between on-premises servers and public cloud services can cause gaps, leading to unnoticed problems.
• Lack of skillset: Effective management and analysis of performance data calls for the expertise of a skilled individual, without which, creating a successful application performance monitoring strategy can prove to be a daunting task.
• High cost: Incorporating a proficient system for application monitoring may often require a significant investment and could potentially raise your overall expenses whenever your application infrastructure requires scaling.

Key features of an application monitoring solution

Application performance monitoring

A comprehensive application monitoring system must encompass deep application performance monitoring (APM) capabilities, including the ability to employ byte code instrumentation. This enables DevOps teams to effectively address performance issues in intricate, distributed applications. By delving deep into the application's underlying code, the solution should be able to pinpoint bottlenecks, track transaction paths, and evaluate the utilization of CPU, memory, and databases at the code level. Furthermore, it should have the capability to identify errors, exceptions, and other irregularities within the code.

In addition, an application monitoring tool should also offer advanced capabilities such as automated service mapping, thread profiling, and custom transaction tracking for better performance tracking. It should have the flexibility to be easily deployed into development, QA, and production environments, with compatibility for a diverse range of key programming languages such as Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, and more.

Hybrid infrastructure monitoring

The success of critical business processes relies heavily on a diverse range of resources, such as servers, databases, and application servers. In the event of a failure of any of these resources, the entire system is left vulnerable to outages and performance slowness. With the introduction of cloud platforms and other cutting-edge technologies, the landscape of infrastructure monitoring has undergone a significant transformation to encompass a broad spectrum of resources, including virtualized environments, cloud infrastructure, microservices, and containers.

Despite being time-consuming and expensive, continuously monitoring the entire application stack is crucial for maintaining the stability of a business. A thorough understanding of the inner workings of infrastructure components enables better management of the application's requirements and early detection of potential issues, resulting in enhanced performance optimization, efficient capacity planning, and cost control.

A good application monitoring solution should be capable of supporting a wide range of hybrid business infrastructures, including servers, databases, VMs, containers, and load balancers. It should be designed to work seamlessly with both on-premises and cloud-based systems, and should offer support for a variety of technologies, from legacy software like IBM i, Windows, Linux, AIX operating systems, to modern cloud and container orchestration platforms such as AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, and more.

Digital experience monitoring

To achieve maximum success in the business realm, it is crucial for your application to have a proper digital end-user experience strategy in place. This requires constant monitoring of both the front-end and back-end performance of your application. By attaining a complete understanding of your application's front-end performance, you can acquire invaluable insights into its operation and user engagement in real time.

A strong application monitoring tool should continuously monitor the actual user experience of web applications and obtain deep visibility into their front-end performance in real time. It should be capable of performing synthetic tests on critical user paths and should provide valuable insights on actual user behavior patterns. Additionally, it should have the capability to consistently monitor API endpoints to gain a wider understanding of the end-user experience. This enables you to analyze the interactions of users from various locations with your application, potentially resulting in enhanced user loyalty, reduced expenses, improved customer retention, and increased profits.

Application discovery and dependency mapping

In order to effectively handle multiple applications within a business environment, it is essential for DevOps administrators to have a comprehensive understanding of various components and their interdependencies, particularly when troubleshooting incidents. By gaining a complete understanding of the connections between different resources and infrastructure elements within an application, you can stay fully aware of your infrastructure's operations and quickly pinpoint any affected resources during performance problems.

A reliable application monitoring solution should have the ability to offer a comprehensive visualization of your servers and applications in your infrastructure, including their interdependencies, to assist you in analyzing the changes and its impact. This requires continuously discovering applications across various servers, generating visual representations of their interrelationships, and consistently updating these maps with newly-discovered resources to ensure precise, up-to-date data and to prevent overlooking any of the infrastructure changes.

AI-powered alerting and reporting

The significance of real-time alerts in application monitoring cannot be emphasized enough, as they serve as a vital tool in quickly detecting performance problems during periods of application downtime or slowdowns. Thanks to the advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, resolving incidents has become remarkably efficient, enabling users to promptly address critical issues. Furthermore, the seamless integration with external systems has made it easier to receive timely notifications through various mediums, including email, SMS, Slack notifications, and ITSM tickets.

Additionally, it is essential to obtain comprehensive performance analytics for your application infrastructure to efficiently track and evaluate its performance, particularly in hybrid or microservices environments. An effective application monitoring system should offer a variety of pre-defined reports that can be tailored to your specific needs and are generated automatically without the need for coding or intricate query input. Moreover, it should be capable of visualizing and presenting these reports on custom, user-intuitive dashboards and quickly sharing them with relevant stakeholders within your organization for clear insights.

What are the best practices for application monitoring?

Maintaining a reliable and high-performing application requires tracking and analyzing various metrics and events to ensure that the application is functioning as expected and to detect any issues that may arise. Following are some best practices to be adhered to for an effective application monitoring strategy:

1. Establish clear monitoring goals: Before implementing any monitoring solution, it is vital to establish a clear set of objectives and requirements that you want to achieve for your application (eg: <1% error rate) This will enable you to identify the relevant metrics to monitor and effectively analyze the collected data.
2. Track application stack across layers: Monitoring your application across various layers, such as frontend, backend, database, and network, is crucial to get a complete picture of the application's performance. Overlooking any of these layers can result in gaps in understanding and hinder the ability to pinpoint the underlying cause of any problems.
3. Monitor from the end user's perspective: To ensure the seamless operation of your application, it is crucial to closely monitor the user's perspective and gain a deep understanding of their experience. This allows you to gather valuable insights and identify any potential issues or bottlenecks that may be affecting their overall satisfaction with the application.
4. Track critical performance metrics: Efficiently tracking and analyzing key metrics that directly affect your application's performance and user satisfaction is crucial. By doing so, you can quickly identify and address any potential issues that may significantly impact your application's performance. These metrics may include response time, error rates, resource utilization, and more.
5. Set up alerts and notifications: Keeping tabs on application performance can be challenging due to the sheer volume of data generated. To effectively manage this, it is crucial to configure alert systems that provide timely updates whenever specific thresholds or anomalies are identified. This proactive approach enables swift detection and resolution of potential issues, safeguarding the experience of your end-users.
6. Regularly review and analyze data: Monitoring is an ongoing process, and it is crucial to regularly evaluate and analyze the collected data. This aids in detecting any recurring patterns or trends that could signal potential problems and allows for proactive troubleshooting. It is also essential to regularly reassess and refine monitoring strategies as the application progresses.
7. Monitor all environments: Your application may behave differently in different environments, such as development, testing, and production. It is of utmost importance to carefully monitor each of these environments to ensure consistent performance and instantly resolve any potential problems that may arise.
8. Involve all stakeholders in monitoring: Application monitoring is not just the responsibility of the development or operations team. It is essential to involve all stakeholders, including developers, QA, and business teams, in the monitoring process. This inclusive approach promotes a complete understanding of the application and ensures that everyone is on the same page when it comes to monitoring and addressing any issues that may arise.
9. Document and share best practices: As you gain experience with application monitoring, document and share best practices with your team. This can help improve the overall monitoring process and ensure consistency across different applications.
10. Implement a disaster recovery plan: Despite all the efforts, unforeseen problems can still occur within an application. It is crucial to have a contingency plan in place to mitigate the impact of any major issues. This may involve implementing backups, failover mechanisms, and a well-defined process for addressing critical incidents.

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