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Why is APM important? Breaking down the benefits New to application performance management (APM)? Read a quick primer on how it works and why it’s become a business necessity. BY BRENDAN COOPER, PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER FOCUSED ON APPDYNAMICS SAP MONITORING SOLUTION LET’S FACE IT: Our lives revolve around applications. We use them to engage and transact with our customers, to drive our productivity at work, in our downtime to stream videos, browse the internet, and stay connected with friends and family. And we expect them to perform flawlessly every time. Think about the last time you experienced poor app performance. Did you try to use the application again, or did you — like most consumers surveyed — simply move on? The reality is that the new competitive battlefield is digital, and the winners and losers are defined by the experience they provide. But this unforgiving demand from users around the world has put technologists under massive pressure to keep their applications continually available and operating at peak performance, at the risk of losing customers and revenue and, ultimately, damaging their brand’s reputation. This is where application performance management (APM) comes into play. And with the above in mind, it’s easy to argue that APM is not only important, but an absolute business necessity.
What is APM and why is it important? In short, APM is the practice of proactively monitoring the many facets of an application environment in order to identify and mitigate issues before they
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become major problems. Across the typically complex and distributed ecosystems of today’s applications, we can think of APM as our guide in finding the needle (or needles) in a digital haystack that spans multiple locations, across various types of technology.
But why do we need APM, specifically? Let’s look at a few key APM benefits and the role they play in solving performance problems. Benefit #1: APM breaks down operational silos APM provides a unified view across your entire application stack, including every component, connection point, dependency, and user interaction. This benefits the different teams supporting your application by equipping them with comprehensive visibility, which allows them to collaborate in a way that would be virtually impossible without APM. This is particularly important in the highly distributed, multicloud environments that support so many modern applications today. Benefit #2: APM allows you to meet — and exceed — customer expectations As we discussed earlier, when an application experiences performance issues, or is unavailable, you run the risk of losing customers. APM provides
