APM can mean either Application Performance Management or Application Performance Monitoring. Application Performance Management aims to identify and pinpoint complex performance issues that prevent an expected level of service from being reached; it is "the translation of IT metrics into business meaning." Here we will deal with Application Performance Monitoring as a component of any IT operations monitoring effort in networks of any size.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Modern, distributed applications require performance monitoring tools that provide both technical depth and operational intelligence. Paessler PRTG delivers this through its comprehensive sensor library, intelligent alerting, and unified dashboard approach that tracks critical KPIs.
Unlike more specialized APM tools that then require multiple solutions for complete visibility, Paessler PRTG monitors not only the application along with the network, but also the underlying server infrastructure all from a single platform. This gives an organization end-to-end observability.
Unlike specialized APM tools that require multiple solutions for complete visibility, Paessler PRTG monitors applications alongside the underlying network and server infrastructure from a single platform, providing organizations with end-to-end observability.
Ready to see PRTG in action? Start your free 30-day PRTG trial and discover how APM from PRTG combined with infrastructure monitoring and intelligent alerting can transform your operations.