{"id":6706,"date":"2018-05-14T07:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/?p=6706"},"modified":"2025-05-16T01:13:23","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T05:13:23","slug":"apm-domain-monitoring-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/apm-domain-monitoring-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Application Performance Monitoring – APM Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Domain Expertise Matters for APM Tools?<\/h2>\n

\"ApplicationApplication performance monitoring (APM) has become one of the key strategies adopted by IT teams and application owners in today\u2019s era of digital business services. Application downtime<\/a> has always been considered adverse to business productivity. But in today\u2019s digital economy, what is becoming equally dreadful is application slowdown. When an application is slow, the end user’s experience accessing the application is negatively affected leaving a dent on the business in terms of commercial loss and brand damage. As organizations start looking for application performance monitoring<\/a> tools, they need to understand what capabilities would be useful to diagnose and troubleshoot performance slowdowns and application failures. This is where the water gets murky.<\/p>\n

\"APMWhile there are many industry guidelines for what an APM tool is and what capabilities it should comprise, what one fails to see is whether those guidelines are applicable for the specific application that one wants to monitor.<\/p>\n

Understanding Different Application Types<\/h2>\n

There are various types of applications being used in IT today. Broadly, these can be characterized as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Web applications<\/th>\nTypically, custom applications built on technologies such as Java<\/a>, .NET, PHP, Python, Node.js, Rails, etc.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Packaged enterprise applications<\/th>\nSAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft<\/a>, SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence, Salesforce, etc.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Desktop-based applications<\/th>\nMicrosoft Office, QuickBooks, Graphics tools, etc.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mobile applications<\/th>\nApplications natively built to run on mobile platforms<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Middleware applications<\/th>\nApplication servers, message queues<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Backend applications<\/th>\nDatabases<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Infrastructure applications<\/th>\nActive Directory, DNS, DHCP, etc.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
VDI applications<\/th>\nCitrix, Omnissa Horizon, Microsoft RDS<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Why One Size Does Not Fit All for APM Tools<\/h2>\n

Monitoring of an application should broadly cover health, availability, response time, and usage. While these are common categories of metrics that apply to all types of applications, the detailed performance metrics in each category are dependent on the nature and domain of the application. Metrics that apply for SAP may not apply for a .NET-based web application<\/a>. Performance monitoring of a database would be entirely different from VDI application (such as Citrix). For effective monitoring, performance metrics gathered should be domain-specific and must provide enough intelligence for the respective domain administrators and helpdesks, assisting them to detect and rectify problems quickly.<\/p>\n

Even the methods used for performance data collection will be vastly different from one application type to another. This means the same monitoring mechanism cannot be generalized and applied to any application, which, in turn, implies that the monitoring capabilities that are needed for each application may be different. Organizations must understand this while looking for application performance monitoring solutions.<\/p>\n

When evaluating different monitoring solutions, consider the domain expertise built into each solution you are considering. Generic metrics that apply across application types are often insufficient to identify the root cause of problems<\/a>. Likewise, when analyzing analyst reports, try to glean what type of application the analysis has focused on. For instance, if you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM, its focus is mainly on web servers, Java<\/a> and .NET<\/a> application servers, and applications that process HTTP\/S transactions. Hence, this analysis is not relevant if you are looking to monitor Citrix<\/a> and VDI infrastructures, to monitor SAP<\/a>, or if you are seeking a unified console to monitor your database servers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Tradeoffs<\/p>\n

Every application is not the same and every APM solution is not the same. Understand the ideal use cases for each technology, otherwise, you will end up comparing apples and oranges!<\/p>\n

\"MonitoringMake sure your definition of an application matches with the analyst\u2019s definition. If you ignore this, you may end up wasting time looking at monitoring solutions that may not even be suitable for your specific requirements.<\/div>\n

Similarities Exist in Principle, But Effective Performance Monitoring Demands Domain Expertise<\/h2>\n

The three dimensions that Gartner mandates as functional requirements of an APM tool (Digital Experience Monitoring; Application Discovery, Tracing and Diagnostics; Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) largely apply for any type of application.<\/p>\n