Application Performance Monitoring with PRTG: Complete APM Guide

Desktop applications, web applications, and SaaS solutions are essential tools that employees in any company need to complete their daily tasks. Monitoring their performance is therefore key to ensuring that all of these processes and activities continue to run smoothly. Because users' day-to-day tasks depend on various types of software applications, it should come as no surprise that business success is directly proportional to application performance.

Application Performance Monitoring is a critical and important step for any organization that aims to deliver and maintain superior user experience, end-user experience, customer experiences, and digital experiences.

What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application Performance Monitoring covers both the technical performance of the application and the performance as perceived by users through user interactions. Because modern applications run on widely distributed infrastructure, all of their various application components are in a constant state of change and very difficult to monitor. A useful APM tool should be able to look across all these applications' key components to aid troubleshooting, debugging, and diagnostics while simultaneously managing the application's performance throughout its entire lifecycle.

Modern application environments also face unique challenges. Cloud-native architectures, microservices, and distributed databases create increasingly complex interdependencies that traditional performance monitoring tools struggle to handle. These complexities require APM solutions that can monitor database requests, resource utilization, and user counts across various and diverse infrastructure components, both in cloud environments and on-premises deployments.
DevOps teams need a single pane of visibility across both frontend and backend components to ensure optimal performance.

Why Application Performance Monitoring Matters for Modern IT

APM tools are a dime a dozen these days. One should rely on a tool that supports (or performs smoothly in the background) the following useful functions or APM steps within IT workflows:

• The most important characteristic of a good APM tool is monitoring the performance of each request and response, including tracking their response times and latency. These are known as transactions and can impact user interactions and lead to higher error rates.
• Applications can be slow because of problems with any of their dependencies, like the database, web server, APIs, or caching. It's therefore important to monitor not only the application but also all of its dependencies to identify potential bottlenecks and performance issues across the entire full-stack infrastructure.
• Logs and any errors in those application logs are vital to quickly troubleshoot application performance issues and support debugging efforts. Monitoring error rates and performing diagnostics help pinpoint issues before they reach end users. Although one can access numerous server logs manually through other means, it's handy to have all those records in a central dashboard that also tracks other key KPIs.
• It's equally important to monitor the server's CPU and memory usage, especially if one wants to automatically scale an application according to traffic changes and optimize resource utilization through automation.
• Real-time alerting and intelligent notifications ensure IT teams can respond to performance problems before they impact end users. Alerts can be delivered through multiple methods, including email notifications, push notifications, SMS text messages, and SNMP traps. This proactive approach helps minimize downtime.
  

PRTG's Comprehensive Application Monitoring Platform

Use our monitoring software to help keep your applications and application servers up and running by spotting and solving potential problems early on. Proactive monitoring is only possible if an admin monitors an application comprehensively. The only way to achieve high uptime is to monitor the availability and status of each application component. 

Application and web server monitoring, along with monitoring of their associated components by PRTG, provides the basis for keeping an eye on not only their overall status but also on the statuses of any subcomponents—and ensuring functionality of the entire network through infrastructure monitoring. This full-stack approach helps streamline monitoring workflows in complex environments and supports DevOps practices.

Database, Web Server, and Email Monitoring with PRTG

Paessler PRTG comes with numerous database, web server, and mail server sensors, along with extensive integrations. From HTTP sensors that monitor web server availability and response times to HTTP Data Advanced sensors for retrieving and analyzing XML or JSON data from applications and APIs, to Application Server Health sensors, PRTG monitors numerous parameters affecting monitoring quality and tracks application performance metrics.

1. Monitoring of all major SQL Server applications is supported out of the box, complete with specialized sensors for both database monitoring requests and resource consumption monitoring. PRTG can also integrate virtually any database addressable via OLE DB or ODBC into application monitoring, including those with the ADO SQL v2 sensor.
   Our monitoring software provides real-time visibility into performance metrics and connection health of databases through seamless integrations. Advanced diagnostics capabilities are included to help identify issues, whether on the frontend or backend.
2. Web servers are among the standard applications found in any company. These applications serve as the basis for both Internet and Intranet sites and have extremely high availability and performance requirements. PRTG covers all the important representatives in this area. PRTG automatically discovers all IIS and Apache web servers with a range of ready-made sensors with built-in automation.
3. Email still forms the backend of almost all corporate communication. In addition to the standards for various known email servers, PRTG includes on-board tools to monitor blacklists or round-trip sensors to monitor the complete send and receive cycle of an email.

Enterprise-Grade Alerting and Scalability

PRTG's enterprise-grade alerting system prevents minor performance issues from becoming critical outages. The platform offers gradual dependencies to avoid alarm floods and fail-safe monitoring with cluster configuration for automatic failovers. Supporting up to several thousand sensors per installation, PRTG scales from SMB applications to complex enterprise environments, supporting various use cases across an application's entire lifecycle.

PRTG vs. Specialized APM Solutions

While APM tools such as Datadog and New Relic focus solely on application metrics, and open source alternatives require extensive configuration, PRTG provides unified monitoring that correlates application performance with underlying infrastructure health through infrastructure monitoring. 

This integrated approach eliminates the need for multiple observability platforms and provides faster root cause analysis when performance issues span both applications and infrastructure, reducing MTTR. Unlike fragmented monitoring solutions, Paessler PRTG supports both on-premises deployments and hybrid environments while providing comprehensive diagnostics across the entire stack.

Get Started with PRTG Application Performance Monitoring