8 benefits of APM for businesses
Application performance monitoring helps development teams identify and resolve performance problems, which leads to various business benefits for organizations.
Application performance monitoring is one of the most important ways to make sure applications meet user and business needs. Running business applications without an APM program is like driving a car without any gauges. You can do it, but you never know when something unfortunate is happening -- or is about to happen. Although this is a relatively simplistic view of APM, it highlights the basic principle behind the technology: It's all about the data it generates.
APM software collects metrics about every facet of an application's infrastructure. That data enables developers and IT operations teams to identify potential performance problems before they happen or more easily diagnose them afterward. But beyond simply monitoring the health of applications, APM tools provide additional value to both the software engineering and business sides of an organization.
There's always room for improvement when it comes to application performance. For developers, APM's direct benefits are insight into both production-level performance and application performance metrics in other environments. This insight makes it significantly easier to identify discrepancies across multiple application environments while also providing a mechanism for diagnosing performance issues without affecting production stability.
In turn, improving application performance through APM leads to tangible benefits for the business, which are explained below.
Business benefits of application performance monitoring
An effective application performance monitoring strategy can reduce IT-related business risks and increase technology ROI. Here are eight specific benefits of APM that businesses should be able to gain.
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What is APM? Application performance monitoring guide
1. Reduced time to recovery
One of the most immediate benefits of introducing an APM process into IT workflows is a faster recovery time from application outages and other critical incidents. Mean time to recovery (MTTR) is a valuable metric that also indicates how much application downtime risk is introduced by new software releases or significant infrastructure changes, which can create performance problems.
The lower the MTTR, the lower the risk of extended outages -- and APM helps achieve that. It can also reduce mean time to detect (MTTD), a related and equally important metric. APM enables both the rapid identification of application defects and their swift resolution, as shown by improved MTTD and MTTR numbers.
Even better, because a well-utilized APM tool helps identify problems earlier than they'd otherwise be detected, it's less likely that recovery is necessary at all. Rather than reacting to incidents, active measurement of critical performance metrics makes it possible to mitigate issues proactively.
2. More rapid defect diagnosis
Not all application issues result in downtime. Many defects and other software bugs can slow performance and harm the end-user experience without causing an outright outage. When fully integrated into the application infrastructure, APM eliminates the "hunt and peck" method of diagnosing issues and helps development teams zero in on the root cause of performance problems.
The easier it is to diagnose defects, the more time developers can spend on building new features. This helps create a more stable and performant application. It also bolsters development innovation while fueling revenue growth and reducing customer churn on external applications.
3. Increased software engineering productivity
Most of APM's focus is on monitoring the health of applications in production environments, but there's a strong case to be made for incorporating it into preproduction environments as well.
Although development and staging environments don't reach anywhere near the same level of traffic as production ones, having APM processes as part of them can help identify lower-hanging fruit that standard unit and integration tests might miss as issues. This additional information can help prevent defects before they occur in live applications, which ultimately reduces the need for rework.
From exception handling to system performance, the more details that development and test teams have at their disposal, the more finely tuned an application can become before ever being exposed to internal users or customers.
4. Improved application stability and uptime
The natural end result of reduced recovery times, faster defect diagnosis and a more productive engineering team is more stable applications overall. That's not only because you're resolving the big performance issues with APM's assistance but also because you're able to resolve the little ones that affect application uptime one incident at a time.
It's not about simply surviving death by a thousand cuts, though. APM helps eliminate many of those cuts to begin with, further boosting uptime levels. Instead of constantly having to apply bandages to applications, the insight offered by APM enables developers to head off once-a-week or once-a-month performance issues and keep their applications running smoothly.
5. Fewer business disruptions
When an application performance incident occurs, more than just developer time is wasted. Business operations are also disrupted. That can directly hurt a company's financial performance and also affect stakeholder trust, customer success and churn rates, among other things. Every application performance problem comes with a cost. While APM won't help avoid or quickly resolve every problem, it should minimize disruptions, which will pay business dividends in the long run.
At the end of the day, users and business stakeholders don't care about performance metrics. To them, it's not about MTTD, MTTR, improved response times or increased uptime; it's about how well an application meets their needs. One surefire way to fail to do so is to offer applications that internal or external users can't rely on because of performance issues. Behind the scenes, APM reduces the chance of that happening.
6. Lower costs and more efficient use of IT resources
A poorly architected application can get expensive quickly. The engineering productivity and application stability benefits that can be gained from using an APM tool should result in lower development costs. In addition, the increased insight into an application's performance can be used to tune the underlying system infrastructure to ensure that the application is being powered by just the right amount of IT resources.
This can come in the form of reduced CPU and memory requirements or more efficient code design to avoid a system upgrade. But the result is the same: an opportunity to reduce the amount of money it takes to keep the application up and running. Combined with automated resource scaling capabilities and ring deployments, which sequentially roll out application updates to different groups of users, APM can help developers and IT operations teams make sure that resource allocation is always on the money.
7. Better end-user experience
Although APM often focuses on the technical side of application performance, the end user is the ultimate judge of what matters. Shaving a tenth of a second off of a background job might feel good to a developer, but if the application still takes a full minute to load, end users won't be impressed.
Optimizing performance without the user in mind is a mistake that can lead to a bad development strategy. Fortunately, APM tools help organizations monitor end-user experience by measuring it quantitatively, tracking everything from the UI to the database and beyond. APM insights can also help improve UX by identifying technical issues that might interfere with performance and application scalability.
8. Higher customer satisfaction levels
Ultimately, every other benefit of using an APM tool leads to one thing: higher customer satisfaction levels. Whether APM processes enable an organization to improve an application's stability and uptime, resolve performance issues faster or release new features more efficiently -- or, ideally, all of those things -- the end result is a happier, more satisfied customer. That applies to both external and internal users, depending on the application.
Additional technical benefits that APM provides
Like a Swiss Army knife, APM software offers many features. Although the overall goal is to provide insight into the application architecture, it commonly includes additional tools to help teams better identify where, when and why an application is performing the way it is. This capability can come in the form of automated alerting, multi-environment tracking, version control integration and, increasingly, AI functionality. Such features add valuable context and clarity to performance metrics.
The following are two other technical benefits that can also result from APM initiatives.
Less risky troubleshooting of performance issues
From an engineering perspective, there's nothing more stressful than diagnosing hard-to-find issues in a production environment. One wrong step can cause an outage -- and a bunch of angry users. APM processes mitigate these issues. Rather than needing to reproduce an error in a live production environment, a development team can review the metrics collected by an APM platform to better understand the circumstances that caused the issue and then recreate it in a controlled environment.
Streamlined SLA compliance tracking
Compliance with service-level agreements (SLAs) isn't only challenging -- it's critical. Although there are well-documented methods and specific tools for tracking SLA compliance, you can use APM tools to generate reports that accurately demonstrate it, in addition to the performance metrics and reports they provide. This reduces tool sprawl and increases confidence in the compliance data by committing to a corporate standard for collecting data on application performance.
Deciding whether to deploy an APM platform
Not every organization or application development project requires an APM platform. For some, the number of features the tools provide is overkill. For others, the technology isn't focused enough. When deciding if an APM tool would be beneficial to your organization, here are two questions worth considering.
Does my organization need the features an APM platform provides?
The core functionality of APM software can generally be broken down into two categories: monitoring and analysis. The monitoring part is relatively straightforward and broadly applicable, but the analytics features that most APM tools offer might not be useful in all cases.
Ultimately, the size of your application infrastructure plays a significant role in the type of APM tool you might want to use -- if at all. Heavily trafficked applications, for example, find more value in APM software that offers user-focused monitoring and analysis features, while complex applications benefit from APM platforms with significant root cause analysis features.
Would an APM platform be a cost-effective investment for my organization?
From a software engineering perspective, there's nothing more valuable than data. When something goes wrong with an application, that data is doubly important. An application can run without APM software tracking its performance, but diagnosing bugs and other problems is much more difficult. APM tools aren't always cheap, but neither are developers. If you provide tools that let your development team focus more on building and maintaining applications and less on investigating performance issues, the better off your organization should be.
Once an APM platform is deployed, a long-term reduction in application development and related IT infrastructure costs is an excellent way to measure its ROI. But overall application usage is an even more valuable ROI metric. APM-driven improvements that boost an application's stability and reduce its latency and response times often increase the amount of time employees or customers spend using the application -- an outcome that can have a positive financial effect for a company.
Zachary Flower, a freelance web developer, writer and polymath, strives to build products with end user and business goals in mind and an eye toward simplicity and usability.
