Application performance monitoring vs. management
Explore the nuances between application performance monitoring and application performance management, especially in enhancing application efficiency and the user experience.
Most IT professionals will tell you APM is important. But if you ask them what APM means, you will likely get different answers. Some IT practitioners will refer to application performance monitoring, while others will say application performance management.
Those differences in wording have important implications for APM initiatives, practices and outcomes. The two forms of APM have been core IT practices for over a decade, helping IT teams boost application performance, reduce downtime and improve the end-user experience. Rather than treating them as interchangeable processes, it's essential to understand their nuanced distinctions.
While application performance monitoring tracks application status and identifies problems, such as slow responsiveness or abnormally high CPU and memory use, application performance management is a broader practice that monitors application performance and identifies opportunities for improvement or optimization.
In both cases, teams typically use monitoring tools to collect performance metrics and logs generated by applications. They might also collect data from upstream and downstream services that create dependencies for applications or from IT infrastructure, such as the servers that host applications.
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What is APM? Application performance monitoring guide
After the performance data is collected, it's analyzed for anomalies or the following signs of problems:
- Errors that indicate an application failed to process a request successfully.
- High latency rates that mean the application is slow to respond to user requests.
- Outage events that occur when an application crashes or becomes unreachable by users.
Based on these insights, technicians can then respond to and remediate the issues. But application performance management goes further: As part of that process, teams also look for ways to enhance application performance continuously.
Key differences between application performance monitoring and management
Application performance monitoring and application performance management both help organizations improve the user experience by identifying and correcting issues related to application performance. They also employ similar techniques -- specifically, the collection and analysis of metrics and log data, often in real time, to detect performance problems.
Beyond this overlap, application performance monitoring and management are distinct practices. Here are the main differences between the two types of APM.
Scope
The biggest difference between application performance monitoring and application performance management is that the former only identifies and remediates problems. It tells teams when an application performs poorly and requires a response to address or avoid UX disruptions. In contrast, application performance management detects as well as corrects performance issues and optimizes application performance over time.
Examples of application performance management measures could include the following:
- Allocating more CPU or memory to an application to improve its responsiveness.
- Migrating an application to a different server if problems on the original server contributed to low performance.
- Deploying additional instances of an application to improve its ability to handle high volumes of user requests.
- Making internal changes to application code to improve the rate at which requests are processed or to reduce the resources used.
Application performance management has two goals: to identify and remediate performance issues and to find and act on opportunities to improve performance over the long term, increasing application efficiency and reducing the risk of future problems. In this sense, application performance monitoring can be considered a component or subset of application performance management.
Tools
Although the APM tools that teams use to collect and analyze data might be the same in both application performance monitoring and application performance management, the latter practice could require additional software beyond monitoring and data collection.
For example, a team might use software debugging or code optimization tools to pinpoint the source of inefficient performance within an application's code as part of application performance management. These tools would assist developers in implementing changes that optimize internal application logic.
Timelines
Application performance monitoring focuses primarily on detecting and responding to performance issues in real time. What happens in the future isn't a primary concern.
As noted above, detecting and troubleshooting issues is a component of application performance management. However, performance management also involves optimizing future application performance.
This means that application performance management spans a longer timeline. The goal is not just to manage current performance but to also improve and optimize it over the long term.
Data types
Application performance management generally works with broader data types and sources. These include metrics and logs related to application performance, which are also the key data sources for application performance monitoring. However, application performance management processes might also analyze, for example, data related to application hosting costs. This information is useful for finding ways to reduce costs without compromising performance -- which is often a goal of application performance management.
Likewise, application performance management might encompass analyzing qualitative feedback from users about their overall experience rather than focusing on quantitative data such as metrics. These insights can help application performance management teams decide which features or functionality to prioritize when making changes to applications that enhance their performance. For instance, they might decide to prioritize optimizing the performance of capabilities that users report as being most valuable to them.
Software architecture considerations
While application performance monitoring focuses on tracking the status of an application in its current form, application performance management can include implementing architectural changes to an application. For instance, a team might decide to refactor a monolithic application to run as microservices to optimize performance over the long term.
Stakeholders and roles
IT operations teams are the primary owners of both application performance monitoring and application performance management because they typically oversee application performance in production.
However, for application performance management, involving other teams might be necessary. These include software developers who might be asked to change an application's code or architecture to improve performance. Security analysts sometimes have a role in application performance management because changes to application code or deployment patterns can have IT security implications.
In contrast, application performance monitoring is a narrower process that IT teams usually perform independently.
Creating and managing different types of APM initiatives
Most organizations can benefit from both application performance monitoring and application performance management. Monitoring identifies performance problems as they occur, while performance management helps optimize performance over the long term.
To implement both types of APM, it makes sense to start with application performance monitoring, since it requires fewer tools and less data. Teams can deploy basic APM software that collects and analyzes logs from the applications they need to monitor. They can also configure alerts to notify them of potential problems, such as high application error rates or slow response times.
From there, an organization can scale up and out by expanding its application performance monitoring investments. It can deploy additional tools, like ones that analyze the cost of application hosting or that scan application code and identify opportunities to improve internal application logic. It can also collect and analyze data types that extend beyond the performance metrics and logs that are at the heart of application performance monitoring.
Ultimately, the goal should be to fully embrace both types of APM: application performance monitoring to find and fix issues as they arise, and application performance management to reduce the incidence of performance problems and to optimize deployment costs in the long term.
Chris Tozzi is a freelance writer, research adviser, and professor of IT and society. He has previously worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator.
