Application Performance Monitoring

Why Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is Vital for a Business of all the tools at an IT department’s disposal, application performance monitoring (APM) can have the most impact on an organization’s bottom line. Why? Because the right APM can proactively identify and address performance issues before they cause response time delays, impact employee productivity and erode customer loyalty. It can also generate a historical database of performance trends, allowing IT teams to identify and narrow down root causes of performance issues.

Application performance monitoring (APM) is the primary source of guidance when it comes to managing application performance and ensuring availability to end users. With the right APM solutions and a systematic approach to resolving performance issues, businesses can focus on innovation and strategy while keeping their customers happy

Here are the key benefits of application performance monitoring.

Enhanced End-User Experience

In today's highly competitive marketplace, users expect an outstanding experience every time they use your applications or access your website. A single application malfunction could easily translate to lost customers. If the problem is not resolved or keeps coming back, your business reputation is at stake.

An effective APM solution helps you identify performance and availability issues before they impact the end-user. The performance data collected also provides insights into how you can improve and maintain user experience and satisfaction.

Greater Customer Satisfaction

"Measure twice; cut once" is a phrase carpenter say to prevent mistakes. The same is true in APM. If we measure the performance of our applications in development, make adjustments and then continue to do so in production, we can use APM to directly impact customer satisfaction in a positive way. APM is the tool we use to measure performance, analyze the results and in a closed-loop manner take immediate action to continuously keep performance high. Ensuring applications remain available and fast is a great way to keep customers happy.

Business Continuity - Reduced Downtime

IT services are at the heart of any business. Simply put, without the assured availability of those, companies will be confronted with unacceptable downtime that can cost millions in lost revenue. APM's role in improving availability is three-fold: verify that these core services maintain expected levels of availability; ensure more efficient troubleshooting, and promote safer upgrades and changes. In organizations deploying modern APM tools, we have seen 10 times faster problem isolation and an average reduction of 27 percent in Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR).

Application performance monitoring helps reduce revenue risk

In today's on-demand economy, gaining or losing customer loyalty is often just a mouse click away. For example, during the shopping frenzy knew as Black Friday, a failed IT component in an e-commerce system can lead to lost sales and abandoned shopping carts. An application performance monitoring system can proactively identify when system performance levels degrade so that IT can swiftly address the issue, ensuring that shopping carts make it to check-out.

Increased Sales & Revenue

APM can deliver great bottom-line benefits, like increased sales, by reducing mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for production incidents. Recently a customer in the online travel sector, Thomas Cook, realized a 97 percent improvement in MTTR following their APM implementation, which increased online bookings by 30 percent and helped the company recapture an estimated $190,000 of lost business in three months. Quickly detecting, diagnosing, and resolving web performance issues gives a business insight into customer experience to boost sales.

Companies realize higher productivity through application performance monitoring

One of the chief complaints we hear from IT leaders is that they are constantly immersed in the “daily duties” of managing an application infrastructure. As a result strategic initiatives are often postponed or eliminated entirely. Application monitoring tools provide IT teams with a “birdseye" view of what is going on in their environment. APM provides proactive notifications of what needs to be fixed before employees and customers are impacted. As a result, IT leaders can deploy resources smartly to adjust memory, restart services and so on – while having time to focus on strategic, revenue-generating initiatives.

Higher Google Ranking

APM's greatest benefit is being #1 in Google search results. Google now counts site speed as a key ranking factor for search results. If your web application performs well, with high Apdex scores and excellent end-user experience, you have a huge edge in search engine results and watch your organic traffic skyrocket. If your web app is slow, expect to appear far down in search results, and you'll need to spend significant marketing budget to bring in new users.

In Conclusion

It is ultimately important to address customer's issues and boost customer engagement. The market challenges are increasing and the need to please the end customer is definitely a priority. Enterprises are finding ways to deal with these challenges and bringing in tools to make the necessary impact.
APM is thus critical to ensure that the application does what it is supposed to do — empower teams and ultimately ensure the desired customer experience. Performance of the applications is very much critical to ensure profitability and sustainability in a challenging market scenario. This means, the need for APM will only rise, as applications will get more complex and will need more and more third-party integrations. Enterprises will need good and relevant tools to make this possible.