Downtime is a business’s worst enemy. It affects customer reputation, overall revenue, and can leave your teams scrambling to remediate an issue that takes them away from their normal day-to-day. So when there’s a disruption in the availability or quality of your applications for your end users, it can mean trouble in the long run. Using Application Performance Management (APM) tools integrated with PagerDuty can help ensure your systems are healthy, that the right person is quickly notified when something goes wrong, and that you have the data and understanding to prevent it from happening again.
What is APM?
Application Performance Management (APM) is the process of leveraging various monitoring tools to ping, analyze, and view the health of a given application in a production environment. APM tools help gauge performance and flag problems like latency, failures, and code deployment bugs in order to help teams better understand a potential issue or outage and enable them to understand the root cause of the potential application failure or latency.
Top Five 2020 APM Tools
Here are the top five APM tools, in no particular order:
New Relic
New Relic is a software analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. They help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them. Their analytics provide business insights from the billions of metrics your software is producing, including user clickstreams, mobile activity, end user experiences, and transactions. Check out the New Relic/PagerDuty integration guide here.
AppDynamics
AppDynamics allows you to do complete application mapping, transaction profiling, deep diagnostics, and real-time analytics. They help businesses understand the interaction between mobile apps and the server by getting code-level insights on distributed applications across servers, databases, caches, queues, and third-party services. Check out the AppDynamics/PagerDuty integration guide here.
Loupe
Loupe is an effective, feature-packed application performance management tool. Aimed at enterprises and IT administrators, this solution lets you trace events, performance and other metrics to work out the causes of issues affecting software negatively. Loupe automatically groups log events so you can find and address performance issues with a minimum of fuss.
The system also gives you a visual understanding of your application usage and offers insights into bottlenecks that can subsequently be tackled. It’s easy to get up and running with this system, as you don’t have to install anything onto your servers – the setup process is very nicely streamlined.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace uses a combination of their patented PurePath Technology® to capture timing and code-level context for all transactions end-to-end, and PureStack Technology® to correlate guest and host infrastructure health to individual application transactions and affected end users in real-time. Dynatrace lets you see the big picture in context and make the right business decisions faster, by granting visibility into all the channels your users touch and allowing you to leverage the data holistically. Check out the Dynatrace/PagerDuty integration guide here.
Datadog
Datadog APM is a SaaS-based platform for monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing applications. It does this through a number of features, not least by providing full-stack visibility, which allows customers to collect, search, and analyze traces across their full infrastructure, whether cloud-based, servers, or applications.
Datadog’s APM can be deployed on most popular libraries and frameworks with a single command, providing instant monitoring. It also supports the OpenTracing protocols for applications and framework developers for distributed vendor-neutral tracing.
Augment Your APM Tools with PagerDuty
By integrating your APM tools with PagerDuty, you can leverage application data signals to not only notify your team when there is a problem, but also triage and fix them before they become customer impacting and affect availability. PagerDuty works in conjunction with all of these tools, and many more, to provide incident tracking, on-call schedule management, and reliable alerting to help you decrease downtime. And, with PagerDuty, you can capture incidents across all your monitoring tools and get analytics to see the full picture of the health of your product across multiple systems.
Curious to learn what else PagerDuty can do for your organization? Try a 14-day free trial and get started today.