What is APM and What Does the APM Acronym Mean?

What is APM (Application Performance Management)?

Application Performance Management, also known by the APM acronym, allows you to diagnose application performance problems at any level. Half of all enterprises experience application outages several times a month, but diagnosing and fixing application monitoring issues can be complicated.
With APM, you get performance insights that expose and diagnose bottlenecks within the application code and application systems to help you fix issues before users are impacted.

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Why Does Application Performance Management Matter?

Application performance directly impacts business performance. Users rely on applications to reach customers, build and sell products, provide services, automate business processes, and perform almost every other task critical to the business. Yet as applications have become more critical, they have also become more complex— operating in cloud, SaaS, hybrid networks and end-user mobility environments.

For most IT teams, application performance and availability are some of the most visible indicators of their success. Any piece of the puzzle, any flaw in the service, can slow application performance down or cause it to fail completely. To ensure that applications are reliable 24/7, and yield the results that users and business desire, they need to be continuously monitored and analyzed.

What Information Does APM Provide?

APM helps you build and deliver high-performing applications, infrastructure, and networks on and off the cloud. It continuously monitors applications with minimal overhead to give you end-to-end visibility and insights around-the-clock and provides:

Application Performance Insights: Trace every transaction from user to back-end. Understand app dependencies, or expose and fix even the most hard-to-detect code, SQL or web services problems quickly.
Infrastructure Diagnostics: Continuously monitor your dynamic infrastructure. See their impact on your apps and vice versa.

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How Does APM Help in Monitoring and Troubleshooting Applications?

A comprehensive APM solution is critical to minimize downtime and maximize productivity. APM enables App Ops and DevOps teams to:

Rapidly diagnose the root cause of performance problems

Identify performance problems sooner and avoid negative impacts to the business with advanced analytics that detect, isolate, and pinpoint performance problems.
Identify problems fast by seeing all components of application delivery, including containerized environments and micro-services based architectures.
Stitch transactions from the user, across the network, and into the application backend to breakdown silos and eliminate bottlenecks or errors wherever they lie.
Eliminate the “war room” that takes IT resources away from more strategic projects and reduce or eliminate “finger pointing.”

Dramatically improve efficiency

Streamline communication among teams (faster development life cycles, lower support costs, and fewer project failures).
Leverage dashboards and reporting that present relevant information to business, IT, and DevOps stakeholders.
Understand how applications are performing with easy-to-digest performance views.

Proactively manage performance problems

Discover the landscape of application component dependencies across all IT assets to perform impact analysis and to ensure all critical parts of the application delivery chain are monitored.
Enable faster, more accurate planning to minimize the impact of IT change initiatives.