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

How do you holistically monitor your applications?

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

• 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.