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Why holistic monitoring is the key to future-proof your application



The days of monolithic applications and simple monitoring tools are gone. With the arrival of public and private cloud infrastructure and hyperconnectivity on Edge devices, organizations struggle to scale their applications, identify issues before it affects their customers, and to maintain their SLAs. Enter application performance monitoring (APM), a game-changer in the realm of IT operations. Let's embark on a journey to explore the evolution of application monitoring and how Site24x7 APM Insight revolutionizes the process, offering a holistic approach to achieving optimal performance.

Why do you need holistic application performance monitoring?

Every new component added to your service can be another point of failure that can frustrate your end users and cost you business. Modern applications often rely on microservices architectures, cloud infrastructure, and third-party services. This makes it cruition to have making it crucial to have visibility across the entire stack for effective management and troubleshooting. APM is the cornerstone of immaculate application performance. It goes deeper than basic monitoring by collecting data and offers real-time insights, transaction tracing, code-level analysis, alerting, and troubleshooting capabilities. It empowers teams to swiftly identify and resolve issues, optimize performance, and deliver a seamless user experience (UX). With an effective APM solution, companies can:

  • Pinpoint bottlenecks and reduce MTTR by quickly identifying the exact source of the issue down to the code level.

  • Reduce costs by diagnosing and resolving issues rapidly and minimizing business impact.

  • Deliver seamless experiences to your end users and stay ahead of your competition. 

How do you holistically monitor your applications?

Monitoring isn't just about tracking critical metrics to identify issues anymore; it's about gaining insights into the entire application ecosystem. Holistic application monitoring is a comprehensive approach to monitoring the availability and performance of an entire software application ecosystem and focuses on monitoring all aspects of the application stack, including frontend, backend, infrastructure, and user experience. This approach provides a unified view of the application's behavior and performance, allowing organizations to identify and address issues proactively before they impact end users. By monitoring the entire application ecosystem, organizations gain valuable insights into the relationships and dependencies between different components. This enables them to optimize performance, ensure reliability, and deliver exceptional user experiences, taking you from merely monitoring your application to achieving full stack observability.

A good APM solution will capture all the important data to track critical metrics about the health of your applications and services and keep your application running smoothly, but a great APM solution will go beyond the bounds of traditional monitoring and capture front-end and back-end components, along with infrastructure metrics, to achieve comprehensive observability.

Site24x7 offers a holistic front-end view of application stack by allowing you to integrate your APM tool with real user monitoring (RUM) that allows you to experience your application through the eyes of your end users, while synthetic monitoring allows your to simulate user journeys to proactively identify and rectify issues. Integrating your APM solution with RUM and synthetic monitoring provides a full view of the front end of your application, covering all your digital experience monitoring needs.  

Features like distributed tracing enhance this process by tracking user journeys across your entire application ecosystem and identifying performance bottlenecks within microservices and specific code sections. Combining distributed tracing with log analysis offers deeper insights into the causes of issues. Log analysis examines log files generated by various components of your application, revealing valuable details about errors and exceptions that might not be immediately evident from metrics alone.

The core of any APM solution is to gather and analyze as much telemetry data as possible from your back-end application. Site24x7 APM Insight gathers metrics from every nook and cranny of your application, capturing the golden signals at the application, instance, transaction, and component level. Additionally, it also captures crucial performance indicators such as response times, throughput, error rates, and user satisfaction scores that gives you a granular view of your application's health. The depth of monitoring doesn't stop at predefined metrics. There is also an option for you to define custom metrics that give you a more tailored monitoring experience, ensuring that you are monitoring what matters most to your application logic.

Imagine a visual representation of your application's entire ecosystem that would allow you to see your entire application infrastructure along with its various components, and how they interact with external services. With Site24x7 APM Insight you can create this visualization using a service map or app-flow map and get a clear understanding of how different elements influence the overall performance of your application.

Site24x7 APM Insight offers a comprehensive solution for optimizing application health and delivering exceptional user experiences by empowering you to track the golden signals at a granular level, define custom metrics, compare performance across milestones, and integrate with infrastructure components.




Best practices to future-proof your observability tool

It is crucial to implement application performance monitoring strategies effectively to thrive in this current digital landscape. This ensures seamless application performance, enhances user experience, and future-proofs your monitoring initiatives, placing you ahead of the curve. Here are some best practices to focus on to future-proof your monitoring practices:
  • Focus on scalability. When choosing a SaaS-based APM solution, scalability is key to ensuring long-term effectiveness. As your application grows and evolves, your APM tool must be capable of handling increasing workloads and seamlessly integrate with various development and operations platforms without compromising performance. This ensures that your observability efforts remain robust and reliable, no matter how complex or large your application becomes, keeping you ahead of potential issues and enabling smooth scaling as your business demands.

  • Correlate application and system metrics. Linking application performance metrics like response times and error rates with underlying system metrics (CPU usage, memory, and network throughput) allows a comprehensive view of the system's health that helps in quickly identifying the root cause of issues, whether they originate from the application code or the infrastructure. As systems grow more complex, this integrated approach is crucial for maintaining performance, improving reliability, and scaling efficiently.

  • Leverage AI and ML. Choose a SaaS-based APM tool with robust AI, ML, and automation capabilities. These advanced features not only help in proactively identifying performance issues but also enable the system to resolve them automatically, allowing issues to self-heal before they impact your users. This approach ensures that your application remains resilient and high-performing, even as it scales and becomes more complex. By integrating automation into your APM strategy, you can reduce the need for manual intervention and stay ahead of potential bottlenecks, making your monitoring efforts more efficient.

  • Integrate with multi-cloud environments. Your APM tool should be compatible with various cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. This flexibility allows you to unify telemetry data from different cloud providers, ensuring high performance, security, and reliability of your applications.

  • Embrace DevOps and continuous delivery. A great APM tool is DevOps' best friend. Integrating APM into your DevOps and continuous delivery pipelines ensures that continuous performance monitoring occurs as an integral part of the development and deployment process, leading to quicker detection and resolution of issues.

Site24x7 APM Insight provides granular insights into performance bottlenecks by meticulously monitoring application transactions and code execution, thus accommodating swift issue resolution and optimization. With comprehensive data collection and analysis, Site24x7 APM empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions, enhance user experiences, and ensure the seamless operation of their applications. A holistic approach to monitoring helps you maximize your application's performance and helps you prepare for the future. Embrace the future of application monitoring with Site24x7 APM Insight and stay ahead of the competition. Sign up for a free trial today and learn how you can truly future-proof your application with Site24x7!