How to Improve Application Performance

Tip 1: Monitor all transactions for all users

Some application performance monitoring (APM) solutions can’t scale to support the volume of big data generated by today’s complex, dynamic application environments. You need to ensure that your APM solution is architected to support petabytes of big data required for forensics and auditing and provides a lightweight agent that won’t place too much overhead on your resources. You should also be able to apply advanced analytics to identify patterns and surface application performance anomalies. Sampling data simply won’t provide you with enough data to identify problems early and resolve complex, intermittent problems.

Learn more about what is APM.

Tip 2: Monitor what you don’t control

Your applications may be comprised of hundreds or even thousands of components, some within your environment and others delivered by third-parties. That’s why visibility into third-party API calls as well as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS is critical. Users (customers, partners, employees) will hold you accountable for the end-to-end experience, whether you are delivering the service or whether it comes from a third party. By monitoring cloud services, you can hold your service providers accountable and the meet service level expectations of your organization. The best way to do this is from the point of consumption – the user’s device.

Tip 3: Understand the end user experience

Ensuring an excellent experience for your customers, partners, and employees is difficult if you are do not have a way to understand the transaction from the point of view of the user. Mobile represents an even greater challenge as the device, O/S, network can and will vary dramatically. Developers should monitor applications in real-time to get visibility into performance, how the application interacts with the network and device, and the impact of performance on the user experience with end user experience monitoring.

Tip 4: Incorporate APM into your change management processes

Application and infrastructure changes inherently reduce visibility and increase app complexity. You may have heard, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Unfortunately, only 5% of business-critical applications are monitored, according industry analysts. However, this number is expected to rise to 20% by 2021 as application performance becomes more critical to business performance. When APM is incorporated into your change management process, you can baseline performance, identify deviations, and proactively investigate and remediate any application performance incidents.

Tip 5: Shift left with regards to APM

The rise of DevOps means that APM can be incorporated earlier in the product development lifecycle so that fixes can be made sooner when it is less costly to do so. This means providing the DevOps team with access to APM tools that can help them better understand the user experience, gain insight into user behavior, and isolate the root cause of performance problems down to the method call. By integrating APM into DevOps practices, you can increase the frequency of releases while at the same time improving the quality of those releases.