Top 8 Application Monitoring Tools for 2024

In this article, we review the top Application Monitoring tools that your business can use. We'll check when you can use them, share our top tips for tool selection, and discuss the benefits of using an APM for your business.

What is Application Monitoring

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) monitors and manages a software application's performance and user experience. The APM seeks to maintain an expected service standard by quantifying the application's current events. To do this, application monitoring software collects information on relevant metrics such as resource usage, downtime, throughput, and error rates.

APM Metrics

An APM tracks four categories of metrics: application metrics, code-level performance, cloud metrics (cloud provider availability and cost spending for cloud infrastructure), and network performance. Some tools can track a combination of two or more metric types.

Key Features

Additionally, a robust APM tool can:

• Track the performance of web requests;
• Monitor the usage and implementation of all dependencies and backend services;
• Provide detailed program transactions;
• Record servers metrics and application framework metrics;
• Oversee user and infrastructure monitoring;
• Track the availability of cloud providers and the cost of spending.

APM is about quantifying events and understanding the reasoning behind performance issues, transactions, successes, and failures. It's your reliable tool for assessing the impact of applications' performance on user experience to help you make your team more efficient.

Selection Criteria

Here are some tips for selecting your project's top application performance monitoring solution. Keep these criteria in mind as you read on:

Database and Dashboard

Analyzing raw data is a difficult task, and it's susceptible to human error. You don't want to have to parse access logs to see what type of requests your users pull.

You want your APM to be able to relay vital information as quickly as possible. In effect, you need your chosen application performance management tools to have extensive reporting and data visualization capabilities. You might wish your application data to be complete and easy to understand

Therefore, there's a tradeoff between complexity and readability. Not all tables are helpful; similarly, not all data points are useful. A dashboard filled to the brim with different tables and graphs may seem more useful, but it could also confuse your overall business strategy with irrelevant facts.

Full-Stack Monitoring

To optimize your application performance and available stack, you need to follow as many relevant data points as possible. The keyword is "relevant."

Relevancy is a characteristic best decided by the project leads and development team, but your ideal monitoring tool should be able to track all data points you deem relevant. You might need to have full-stack monitoring, which incorporates synthetic synthetic transaction monitoring and real-user monitoring of all layers of app resources, including infrastructure and cloud.

More specifically, you need your APM to be capable of:

1. Tracking the usage and performances of app dependencies, including database storage, web services, and caching.
2. Recording web requests and user transactions.
3. Analyzing and monitoring all aspects of web development and app functionality.

AI Incorporation

Valuable operational data is ideally tracked and analyzed in real-time. Modern dev and IT teams seek to find ways to automate processes through machine learning and AI, with a focus on the world of data monitoring and management.

Because microservices and open-source components are standard tools of today's app, modern applications are a jumble of existing ones built on top of one another. It has become difficult to assemble and analyze data given the hundreds of thousands of sources from which it could stem.

The incorporation of AI into an APM would mean employing systems that provide complete visibility and tracking for all your system's components. At the same time, AI and machine learning models could analyze and visualize extensive data collection. AI incorporation should help the business gain deeper, more valuable insights from collected data in half the time.

Cost

An application performance monitoring tool should save the business time and money in the long run. An APM provides automated monitoring and notifications, which reduces the need to hire a dedicated team member. It also identifies the resource-deficient areas of an application, performance bottlenecks, and inefficient components. These aspects save the budget, increase its bottom line, and improve customer satisfaction and retention.

All these factors are considered when you calculate the actual face value of a tool. Where others may directly correlate cost with the product's price, an APM's true worth includes accounting for its benefits and features.

Complexity

Not everything helpful has to be complex. Ease of use should be a criterion to account for. You would want something easy to install, configure, and use. Customizable dashboards and clear visualizations are needed to break down analytics and data on the fly.

On top of that, an APM should be able to integrate correctly with existing components. Your logging system, servers, and databases are core functions that your APM should work well with. Otherwise, what would they be working on?

Double-check the monitoring tool's documentation to see if it can seamlessly cohere with your components.

Security

Security should be any project's priority, especially if the project deals with large amounts of essential business data. You should ensure that the APM tool you use has robust security features that improve the confidentiality and availability of your application data.

A good APM tool should have the following features:

• Data encryption;
• Industry-standard compliance;
• Role-based access control and user authentication;
• Audit trails.

The average data breach cost has increased to $4.35 million in 2022. With 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated daily, security and incident prevention remain a top priority for all users.

While we're here talking about security - check out our free checklist for selecting a cybersecurity services vendor:

Best Application Performance Monitoring Tools for Your Business

We gathered the top 8 APM tools on the market, with different specializations, features, and pricing plans. Let's explore them!

TraceView

Traceview is an application monitoring tool for web-based applications, though it can also be used for mobile applications. Traceview prioritizes user experiences and builds useful data maps and visualizations for quicker performance checking.

Companies like European Environment Agency and FieldLens use TraceView as a real user monitoring system.

Traceviews feature set includes:

• Language Support for .NET, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.JS, and GO.
• Advanced Visualization
• Distributed Transaction Tracing
• Error Reporting
• Machine-Level Metric Collection and Charting

Traceview costs start at $79 per month with an extra $19 per GB of storage per month.

Dotcom-Monitor

Dotcom-Monitor is one of the oldest APM tools on the internet. It tracks performance data by mimicking a user's journey through recorded scripts that can be rerun to ensure that the content and application layer meets the ideal performance metrics.

Dotcom-Monitor's most prolific users are Dell, Comcast, and Dish.

Its features include:

• SSO authentication for users;
• Flexible invoicing;
• Customized reports;
• Account history auditing;
• DNS resolution and blacklists;
• Web and API performance;
• IP-connection monitoring;
• Third-party integration.

While Dotcom-Monitor can offer a free trial version, its paid version begins at $19.95 monthly and scales depending on the company's needs.

Datadog

DataDog's goal is to modernize app monitoring and performance tracking. Its focus is primarily shifted toward cloud monitoring and security. This tool focuses on tracking key analytics and components; it is heavily favored by IT and DevOps teams to continue supervising the cloud and infrastructure.

Here are some of the critical features of DataDog:

• Host and container maps;
• Ready-made, customizable dashboards;
• Alerts notifications using Slack, HipChat, and Campfire;
• Automated insights;
• Forecast monitoring;
• AWS fargate;
• IoT device monitoring;
• Cloud Security Information and Event Management (SIEM);
• Cloud workload security;
• Serverless support.

If you're interested in using DataDog, the company offers a 14-day trial for all its packages and a free version with 1-day metric retention for up to 5 hosts. Its paid version starts at $15 per host every month.

Raygun

Raygun is a SaaS server-side APM that takes a customer-centric approach to application performance monitoring. It makes their application accessible, easy to use, and compatible with over 600+ frameworks and services - supporting popular frameworks like .NET, Ruby, Node.js, and Azure Web Apps. The APM's lightweight SDKs mean that it could integrate with your web application in minutes.

Here are some of the critical features of Raygun:

• Crash reporting;
• Real-user monitoring;
• 30-day Data Retention;
• Unlimited custom dashboards;
• Deployment tracking;
• Core web vitals reports;
• Integration in minutes.

Raygun's on-demand price goes for as low as $8 per month. Its enterprise-level option offers standard features, a dedicated team account, and massive data volume discounts. Raygun can scale as your business grows in a pay-as-you-use model.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics is a Cisco-owned APM built for large enterprises. As it was developed for use in the production environment, this application performance monitoring platform was constructed to use several machine learning techniques, such as anomaly detection, regression, and many more, to detect patterns and trends from your application requests.

Companies that use AppDynamics in their tech stacks include Intuit, Okta, The Motley Fool, and World Remit.

AppDynamic's key features include the following:

• Code-level visibility for resource management;
• Request tracing;
• ML predictions and forecasting;
• Enterprise-grade security.

Because of the scale and level of their product offerings, AppDynamics offers one of the highest prices on this list, starting at $230 per server per month.

Application Insights

Azure Monitor. As Microsoft claims, their application performance management system proactively understands how an application performs and reactively reviews application execution data to find causality. Its target audience is software developers that work in enterprises and small businesses.

Application Insights' core features include:

• Live metrics;
• Availability;
• Usage tracking;
• Smart detection;
• Distributed tracing;
• Cross-platform integration with Windows, Android, and iOS.

Like many other applications on this list, Application Insights also entails a pay-as-you-go model, with the prices starting at $0.615 per GB for Basic Logs and $2.76 per GB for Analytics Logs.

Stackify Retrace

Retrace was founded in 2012 with a focus on building a well-rounded application performance monitoring tool for companies of all sizes. More than 1,000 different organizations use the platforms, with a customer list that spans everything from small businesses to Xerox, Microsoft, and Honeywell.

Designed specifically for developers, Retrace looks to optimize in-app QA performance and "retrace" production problems through code-level transaction traces.

Its features include:

• Language support for .NET, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and Java;
• Deployment tracing;
• Tracks code level performance;
• Seamless integration with common application frameworks, including Azure, AWS, MongoDB, SQL, etc.);
• Integrated errors and log management.

Stackify Retrace is likely one of the most affordable options on this list, with prices starting at $25-$50 per month per server and $10 per month for non-production.

New Relic

New Relic has taken the concept of having a SaaS-based APM to new heights and, by many standards, it is one of the industry leaders in application performance management. It's especially useful for mobile apps and advanced performance monitoring for the browser.

It comes with a bundle of flexible features that include:

• Customizable dashboards;
• AI-driven notifications;
• Robut end-user monitoring;
• Performance analytics;
• Multiple data types and counts;
• Cloud-service instrumentation;
• Tracks code-level performance.

New Relic's prices vary based on the edition you use and the level of access an enterprise will request for their services. Full platform users, for example, start at $99 per month per user, with 100GB of free data ingested per month and then $0.30 for every GB beyond.

Bonus: You might also want to check out the best project management tools for software development if you want to optimize your operations.

Benefits of Using Web Application Monitoring Tools for Business

An APM tool drives countless benefits to your business. As organizations become more reliant on web-based software applications, they need to ensure that everything runs smoothly and efficiently.

Apart from being able to monitor an application's performance and collecting data from various sources, web application performance monitoring tools also offer a number of benefits:

• Meeting User Expectations - It's easier to meet user expectations and significantly improve the user experience when you constantly monitor performance issues and bottlenecks. You could allocate more resources to features with high user requests and gain valuable customer feedback that improves customer satisfaction.
• Reduced Downtime - Downtime is a costly occurrence for application-based businesses. When users can't access your product, it adversely impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty and your business loses revenue. Web application performance management instruments are typically equipped with messaging capabilities that help notify business teams about any significant problems such as software updates, hardware failures, or network outages. Visualization tools could also be used to identify potential issues that lead to breakdowns or failures.
• Optimize Productivity - For web applications in office use, monitoring helps ensure that web-based apps constantly work and that the employees can continuously access and use the platform, which saves time and increases the business' overall productivity.
• Boosting Profits - When businesses meet user expectations and improve their application's availability, profits are boosted. When a company optimizes employee productivity and builds more robust infrastructures to support daily operations, it increases its profits. When companies make better decisions through sought-after, invaluable data, their profits grow. These examples show that when businesses use APMs and use them well, profitability and long-term success follows.

Tips to maximize your APM

If you've already chosen an APM for your web application, here are some tips for you to maximize the use of your new tool:

Avoid Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics exist to look good on paper but only provide little in terms of return on investment. Now, it doesn't mean that vanity metrics are useless, but they could be great in a different context.

A number of concurrent users, for example, would do well in tracking the success of your application, not as a standalone metric. The number of simultaneous users will vary depending on the day of the week, the time of day, and cases of your application use. It's easy to manipulate the number of concurrent users to pick a data point where your app is the busiest. Instead, it would help if you tried to extrapolate your data set over a long period of time and use metrics, such as average request rates or Apdex, to track the success of your application.

You should ensure that you define the key metrics you want to analyze. Identify the core components of your business and find the metrics that define them.

Establish Baselines

Establishing baselines means creating a standard against which you would want to compare existing data points. After defining your key metrics, you should determine the sample size of data points to calculate the average. This is a simple way to establish a baseline. However, it is vulnerable to misleading factors such as outliers and seasonality.

If you have enough data to measure years against one another, you could use a method called time series forecasting to create a baseline of knowledge based on historical data. Seasonality, trends, and unexpected events are better accounted for in this model than in calculating a simple mean. Use this data to improve your Web APM's performance or see if you need to make additional adjustments before scaling.

Maximize on Automation

As previously mentioned, many APMs are capable of automating routine tasks such as sending alerts or creating weekly dashboards. Web APM tools can also be integrated with other IT operations tools to remedy application issues quickly. If a Web APM tool, for example, has detected that a particular feature of the server is low on resources, an automated script could trigger an event that allocates more of them. In other words, prevention is better than cure, and tools like BlazeMeter are often used to simulate real traffic and measure performance metrics to ensure that the web application does what it is supposed to.

Conclusion

The best Application Monitoring Tool depends on your project's requirements. However, such factors as price, ease of use, supported technologies, and cloud compatibility play an essential role in choosing your APM.

An APM needs to point out how or where the issue is. To fix these issues, you'll likely need professionals skilled at improving and building web applications for all use cases. If your business-critical applications currently experience performance issues or you want to update the existing tech stack, application performance management tools should be your next investment.

Looking for an experienced company to assist you with this endeavor? Contact us at TechMagic today!

FAQs

1. What are application monitoring tools?

   Application monitoring tools are utility software used to monitor and analyze data from an application's performance, code, and network connection. They are capable of creating complex dashboards, automating notifications, and integrating well with your application's tech stack.

2. What should I look for while comparing monitoring tools?

   Choosing an APM is a matter of knowing your app's requirements. Our selection criteria when comparing monitoring tools involves the comparison of the following features: database and dashboards, full-stack monitoring, AI Incorporation, Cost, Ease of Use, and Security.

3. What is the most popular application monitoring tool, and is it worth the hype?

   Datadog is the most popular application monitoring tool for the majority of use cases. However, AppDynamics is better for large enterprises, given its enterprise-grade security. AppDynamics is easy to set up and provides real-time monitoring of extensive information on your application's metrics while supporting many of the major platforms.