Application monitoring is essential today, especially considering the growing complexity of the environments and of the application park to be monitored. While not the only monitoring category, which can also focus on networks and infrastructure, it is certainly the one that most influences the user experience. The level of performance, in fact, has an impact on the company both directly and indirectly. Directly, because if an application does not work correctly, it can worsen the customer experience, even leading to the loss of the customer. Indirectly, since the delay in identifying a criticality increases management costs and the commitment of IT staff. For these reasons, the use of application monitoring tools is closely connected to the business, as it helps to optimize processes, make IT more efficient, generate solid customer engagement combined, of course, with significant cost savings. All benefits that are driving an increasingly sustained adoption by organizations, as we have had the opportunity to emphasize previously.
To understand in detail the impact that a lack of application monitoring has on the company business, we can consider one of the functional dimensions into which Gartner divides the APM (Application Performance Management) systems, i.e. digital experience monitoring. The DEM focuses on monitoring everything that determines customer satisfaction when they use the services provided by the company. In this case, application monitoring allows you to discover any vulnerabilities that are at the origin of discontinuity, downtime or interruptions in the user experience. Classic examples are the slow loading time of web pages, mobile apps that often crash or IoT devices such as wearable devices that have difficulties in exchanging data. An end customer doesn't care whether the applications are cloud native or traditional. He expects quality and consistency throughout his customer journey, while these disservices undermine his trust in the brand, whose reputation risks being compromised.
The above application monitoring records all customer interactions with the existing application and is part of real user monitoring (RUM), offering DevOps teams the essential elements to quickly remedy problems as they arise. found. However, in addition to mitigating the consequences of an application malfunction, the advantage of application monitoring is that it can be implemented even before the release of an application thanks to synthetic transaction monitoring (STM). The latter uses behavioral scripts to recreate the actions of potential users, solving bugs and non-optimal performance risks already in the testing phase. The correct measurement of performance during application development drastically reduces the effort and time required in production. This helps IT Operation that not only can focus on issues of greater value, but can make the verification of technical and functional requirements coincide with the needs of the business.
The landscape of vendors of application monitoring solutions is varied. Gartner, for example, in its Magic Quadrant dedicated to APM tools lists some that, however, do not exhaust the possibilities offered by the market. Therefore, in order for the choice to fall on the one or those most in line with the real needs of the company, it is advisable to contact a partner who will assist you in the decision-making process. In this way, the selection will take place after an accurate assessment that accompanies the organization in selecting the open source or enterprise-class product that best fits with the specific starting situation and with the visibility objectives that are intended to be achieved. Application monitoring, in fact, can be added to the infrastructural one and equip IT with a single control platform, it can provide or not agent-push or, again, for those who have cloud native applications, it can find in the methodology AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) the best answer. The important thing is that it is firmly attached to the company's business.