In the past, application performance management tools were costly, and the complexity of configuration, integration, implementation and support needed was overwhelming for many businesses. However, today’s APM tools are much more streamlined and come with a broad range of capabilities that make it easier for businesses to monitor application performance.
Innovation in APM technology and IT systems unification are making a difference in how we monitor critical business applications to improve user experience and streamline business transactions. Here is a short guide on how application performance management is changing.
Automated Performance Analysis
APM tool analytics have seen tremendous change over the last five years. With better capabilities to track and monitor multiple-application performance and availability metrics, businesses are able to predict possible outages or performance issues before they even occur.
Stackify states that businesses, today, enjoy APM solutions that come with automated or self-learning technology that eases the discovery and anomaly detection process. New features are more focused on ensuring automated performance analysis for critical applications and unified IT infrastructures in an organization.
More Focus on User Experience
User experience is the primary area of focus for APM today. This is largely due to increasing growth in user-friendly and more interactive web and mobile applications. Businesses across different industries like banking, telecommunications, healthcare and retail are trying to engage more with customers using both web and mobile applications.
APM tools are more focused on providing a seamless digital experience, improving customer experience and increasing sales. By offering superior application performance and guaranteed availability, businesses can ensure brand loyalty. More APM vendors are specializing in user experience monitoring that offers accurate insights across your entire portfolio of applications.
New Delivery Methods and Greater Features
More organizations are shifting from traditional application delivery methods like the desktop to virtual and hosted infrastructures that make it easier to deliver applications to end users. The same goes for application performance management that is also shifting with changes in delivery methods.
Organizations are looking for APM solutions that are easier to integrate with IT infrastructure, quicker to deploy and effective in collecting vital data to be used in improving the user experience. With delivery methods like software-as-a-service (SaaS) and real-time monitoring features, organizations are able to ensure end-to-end application performance management.
Support for Cloud and Mobile Applications
New application environments like mobile and cloud are gaining more popularity. While they add complexity to APM, they offer deeper insights into understanding what customers are looking for. For instance, having an integrated APM tool that monitors both your web and mobile-based applications offers you a complete view of app behavior based on the type of platform used.
More businesses are migrating their applications to the cloud, and being able to monitor your apps and IT architecture is key to identifying potential performance problems that could affect your entire business operations. With APM tools now supporting multiple layers of infrastructure including cloud and mobile, ensuring a single unified look at app performance is important.
Conclusion
These changes and developments in application performance management have and are continuing to reshape application architectures significantly. Today, we have newer, more dynamic applications that demand advanced performance monitoring capabilities to deliver faster and more consistent end-user experiences.
With the new breed of applications becoming more complex and relying on third-party services and components, both developers and testers must update their application testing, and especially application performance testing more frequently and at a greater level of automation.