Application Performance Monitoring

Monitoring of software application usually includes the following and more -
1. Infrastructure instance monitoring like CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, Network, file descriptors, etc
2. Container (Server) monitoring like JVM utilization, server/access/error logs, etc
3. Application monitoring like No of transactions, type of transactions, response times, etc

There are various tools available for monitoring Application. In this article am sharing some practical benefits of using an APM tool (Appdynamics) which I have been experiencing -


1. Ease of installation, administration and usage

2. Provides information on time taken by the application server and time taken by the database server

3. Provides an ability to further drill to exact method, line number and query that causes slowness

4. Ability to quickly find issues related to lock wait time outs, java exceptions, database exceptions, etc

5. Ease of doing before and after optimization analysis to understand impact on response times of business transactions

6. Provides call stack trace, exceptions, slow queries, query count/repetitive queries, API call count, slow async calls, external calls at one place in easy to understand manner which helps the production management personnel to connect with developers

7. Very less overhead on the application servers on which the java and machine agents are deployed

8. Ability to correlate heap usage with the transactions that impacts it

9. Ease in configuration of thresholds, alerts, package includes and excludes, etc.

10. Helps to find root cause of transaction slowness or run time exceptions in code which can be either in a developers code or the code referred/developed by other teams. Appdynamics helps the team to focus on the issue in hand than finger pointing.

11. Ease of finding the issue saves time and effort that otherwise is spent doing focused performance testing. (Last but not the least, its important to mention that excessive dependency on Appdynamics is not good. A Developer/performance tester some times forgets his very job and depends solely on a APM like Appdynamics)