Applications are the driving engines of any organization and almost every organization, regardless of its size, uses them for a wide range of activities from marketing to improving employee productivity and everything in between. Since these applications are such a critical part of your organization, it's important to ensure they always work optimally. This is where application monitoring comes into play.
Application monitoring is the process by which you stay on top of the health and performance of applications within your organization. Often, organizations have hundreds of custom and third-party apps within the organization, and this makes it impossible for any individual or team to monitor these apps round-the-clock. Thankfully, there are application monitoring apps that continuously look into the performance of applications and send notifications in case of issues.
Here is our list of the best application monitoring platforms:
- ManageEngine Applications Manager – EDITOR’S CHOICE This packager implements a discovery routine and application dependency mapping to identify and document Web applications. Code profiling and distributed tracing provide activity monitoring. Available for Windows Server, Linux, AWES, and Azure. Get a 30-day free trial.
- Site24x7 – FREE TRIAL This cloud-hosted system includes an application performance manager for Web applications that implements discovery, dependency mapping, code profiling, and distributed tracing. Get a 30-day free trial.
- AppOptics Stands out for its scalability and continuous visibility, making it ideal for monitoring diverse applications across any infrastructure. Its intuitive dashboards and advanced alerting options significantly reduce MTTR, enhancing operational efficiency.
- Datadog APM: Datadog APM is notable for end-to-end tracing and real-time insights, optimizing code performance and providing comprehensive application monitoring.
In this article, we will discuss four of the best application monitoring tools available today, so you can make an informed decision as to which is a good fit for your organization. But before that, let's talk about the importance of monitoring and why you need an application monitoring tool in the first place.
Why Should You Monitor Your Application?
Applications are built to be stable and reliable, so why should you bother monitoring their performance and health? And why do you need application monitoring tools and platforms to handle this monitoring for you? Here are some reasons.
- Manages Increased Complexity – When you build an application, you would have certain targets in mind. However, when your business grows and expands over time, these targets may seem modest. For example, you could build a website that can handle about one million footfalls a day. Let's say your business grows by an average of 20% every year, which means, your footfalls would double in five years.
The underlying infrastructure and technology may not be ready to handle this additional load, and it could cause issues like downtimes and breakdowns. In turn, this can impact your end users and through it, your organization's reputation. To avoid these repercussions, an application monitoring tool can proactively inform you about an impending breakdown, so you can take corrective action right away. - Handles Inter-dependencies – Like growing complexity and workload, interdependencies among applications can increase too. Say, for example, you had ten apps when you started, and soon you added more apps to meet the different needs of your organization. Before you know it, the number of apps and their interdependencies can get out of control. In such cases, application monitoring tools monitor specific metrics and inform you when there are performance drops.
- Eases Troubleshooting – Most application monitoring platforms today come with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to not just monitor specific metrics, but also point you to the underlying cause of the issue. Many times, you get the necessary contextual information to quickly fix the problem. Needless to say, this can reduce the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and you can address issues before they impact the wider organization.
- Reduces Maintenance Costs and Effort – Application monitoring tools continuously look into the performance of applications and send notifications in case of major deviations from the established metrics. These notifications enable you to fix problems before they occur, thereby reducing repair costs. They can even reduce your operational costs and effort in the long run.
- Enhances User Experience – As mentioned earlier, regular monitoring of different metrics identifies issues before they create a wider impact. In particular, it reduces the chances of frequent downtimes that can impact end users' accessibility and experience. Such uptimes and the ability of end users to easily navigate to different aspects of your application can even boost their overall experience.
- Provides Analytics – In today's world, analytics plays a key role as it helps you to correlate and make sense of different events that happen within your organization. Application monitoring tools greatly help with analytics as they tend to have detailed logging mechanisms that capture every aspect of an application's work. When you combine these analytics collected across applications, you can better understand the state of your infrastructure and the breakup of your maintenance costs.
In turn, such detailed analytics can help with capacity planning and budgeting. It can also help you to better understand the dynamics of your industry and how your organization fares amongst competitors. Besides, you can get a realistic picture of how your applications perform and what you can do to gain a competitive advantage through them. - Meets Compliance – Many laws and regulations have strict compliance provisions, and failure to meet these provisions can attract hefty fines. Application monitoring platforms help you to meet these compliance targets comfortably.
- Integrates with Other Tools – Most application monitoring tools available today integrate with existing third-party and custom tools within your organization to create a seamless flow of data across them. Such easy integrations save a lot of time and effort in managing and maintaining applications. More importantly, these tools can give a holistic view of how your applications perform currently and the improvements needed to improve their efficiency.
- Provides Control and Visibility – As an organization grows, it becomes increasingly hard to stay on top of every aspect of operations and the applications that drive them. This is where application monitoring tools come in handy as they collate information and present them in the form of dashboards and reports. As a result, a mere glance at these dashboards and reports is enough to understand what's going on within the organization. Furthermore, it enables IT admins to have the control and visibility needed across organizational activities.
- Enables Optimum Resource Usage – Application monitoring tools continuously assess the performance of applications and the resources they consume within the organization. Depending on your goals, you can set up metrics such as bandwidth usage, CPU utilization, etc, and these metrics help you to better understand the organizational resources consumed by individual applications.
Based on this information, you can streamline resource usage to ensure that your most critical applications always have priority when it comes to the usage of network resources. It can even help you to implement strategies such as throttling to limit the consumption of resources by the least important applications. Furthermore, you can also schedule and plan operations better. For example, you can batch together resource-intensive tasks and run them during the off-hours to ensure better usage of resources. - Implements Security – Security is another essential part of any organization's operations, and the metrics gathered by these application monitoring tools can help you to identify security gaps and vulnerabilities. According to the information gathered and the seriousness of the identified vulnerability, you can plan to fix them right away.
The other advantage of application monitoring tools is that they ease the process of implementing security controls and policies across the organization. By gathering the performance metrics, these tools help you to better evaluate the impact of your policies on the performance of applications. Based on these metrics, you can make informed decisions about changing/maintaining the existing policies.
Overall, application monitoring tools provide a ton of benefits for an organization. They go over and beyond just monitoring applications, as you can use the metrics collected for a wide range of decisions and their respective implementations.
That said, not all application monitoring tools are built the same, so you have to choose a tool that best fits your organization. Some tools like the ones we have described below are comprehensive and can help your organization greatly leverage the benefits of these tools.
Methodology for Selecting an Application Monitoring Platform:
- Focus on scalability to ensure the tool can grow with the organization.
- Prioritize platforms offering continuous and comprehensive visibility across all applications.
- Look for tools that reduce Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and enhance operational efficiency.
- Consider platforms with a high number of integrations for extensive compatibility.
- Emphasize on tools providing detailed contextual information for errors and intuitive dashboards for ease of use.
- Seek out platforms with advanced alerting options for proactive monitoring.
1. ManageEngine Applications Manager – FREE TRIAL
ManageEngine Applications Manager simplifies the complex monitoring process and at the same time, provides the insights you need for planning and optimizing the performance of different applications within your infrastructure. In particular, it provides deep visibility into your critical applications and infrastructure components to resolve any performance or latency issues before it impacts your end customers.
This platform combines many individual components such as application performance monitoring, synthetic transaction monitoring, and real user monitoring to deliver superior business outcomes for any organization. It even automates IT and DevOps processes to streamline the development and deployment of applications.
Key Features:
- Monitors applications in dev, QA, and staging environments.
- Supports the monitoring of applications built on a wide range of platforms such as Ruby, Java, .NET, and more.
- Tests the performance of critical user paths to improve the overall end-user experience.
- Checks for application performance from real browsers and environments.
- Generates insights based on geographies, devices, user sessions, networks, response times, and more.
- Monitors workloads and evaluates the performance of applications across any cloud environment.
- Enables you to plan effectively to prevent downtimes due to resource shortages.
- Provides agentless monitoring of different databases.
- Auto discovers applications and maps their dependency in real-time.
Why do we recommend it?
ManageEngine Applications Manager is recommended for its holistic approach to application monitoring, combining various monitoring components to deliver superior outcomes. Its focus on optimizing performance and preemptive issue resolution makes it a valuable tool for any organization.
Overall, ManageEngine Application Manager optimizes applications and their resource usage, so your maintenance costs and downtime chances reduce greatly. Furthermore, it enhances your processes' efficiency and enables you to respond to incidents faster.
Who is it recommended for?
This tool is ideal for businesses seeking deep visibility into critical applications and infrastructure components, especially those in diverse environments including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid setups.
Pros:
- Monitors applications across different development stages and environments.
- Supports a wide range of application platforms for versatile monitoring.
- Improves user experience by testing critical user paths.
Cons:
- Might require a learning curve to fully utilize its advanced features.
Get started with a 30-day free trial.
EDITOR'S CHOICE
ManageEngine Applications Manager is our top pick for an application monitoring tool because it offers comprehensive, real-time insights into the performance and health of applications across diverse environments. Its customizable interface and automatic discovery services speeds up the onboarding provess for IT professionals. The tool supports a wide range of technologies, including web applications, databases, servers, and virtual systems, providing a holistic view of the IT infrastructure. This ensures that potential issues are quickly identified and resolved, minimizing downtime and enhancing the end-user experience. One of the most important features of ManageEngine Applications Manager is its alerting system. It allows users to set custom thresholds for various performance metrics, ensuring that they are promptly notified of any anomalies. This proactive approach to monitoring helps prevent minor issues from escalating into major problems, thereby maintaining the smooth operation of critical applications. The tool offers in-depth reporting and analytics capabilities. These features enable users to analyze historical performance data, identify trends, and make informed decisions about capacity planning and resource allocation. The integration capabilities with other ManageEngine products and third-party tools further enhance its versatility and scalability.
Download: Start a 30-dat FREE Trial
Official Site: https://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/download.html
OS: Windows Server, Linux, AWS, and Azure
2. Site24x7 – FREE TRIAL
Site24x7 is a cloud platform of monitoring and management tools that provides an application performance monitoring (APM) unit. The APM is one part of the platform, which also provides network, server, and cloud platform monitoring. This combination of monitoring services enables the system to immediately pinpoint the root cause of a problem when an issue appears.
Key Features:
- Part of a full stack observability package
- Identifies all contributing services that underpin Web applications
- Multi-platform compatibility that scans on-premises servers and cloud hosts
- Live monitoring of Web applications component by component
- Suitable for tracking the performance of micro-services, websites, and mobile apps
- Discovers all applications and identifies their components
- Scans APIs, frameworks, and function libraries
- Code profiling
- Distributed tracing
Why do we recommend it?
We recommend Site24x7’s application performance monitoring service because of its comprehensive, real-time monitoring capabilities and user-friendly interface. It provides deep visibility into application performance across diverse environments, helping IT teams proactively address issues before they impact end users. Automation in the Site24x7 platform automatically sets up the dashboard with data about your Web applications, thanks to autodiscovery and dependency mapping routines.
The application dependency map enables Site24x7 to forecast imminent resource requirements and check ahead of time for availability. Machine learning processes in the package enable the tool to track multiple applications accessing the same resources simultaneously. Thus, it can let you know if problems arre about to happen. Alerts tell technicians that a problem is about to hit.
Who is it recommended for?
The full Site24x7 platform offers a range of system monitoring services and that is suitable for any size or type of organization. However, the APM is very sophisticated and would be more suitable for DevOps teams that produce and support Web applications. There is an MSP edition for managed service providers to use when managing the systems of their clients.
Pros:
- A cloud hosted package – no need to download and maintain the software
- Can store metrics for historical analysis
- Release management features
- Can integrate with development management tools
- An option for managed service providers
Cons:
- No self-hosting option
The price for the APM edition of Site24x7 starts at $35 per month. Access a 30-day free trial.
3. AppOptics – FREE TRIAL
AppOptics is a popular application monitoring platform that can continuously monitor your applications to reduce downtimes and optimize resource usage. It supports applications hosted on servers, containers, on-prem infrastructure, cloud, and just about anywhere else. The highlight of this tool is that it simplifies the process of monitoring all kinds of applications, including legacy and custom-built ones, and through it, provides the insights and business analytics needed to enhance your operational efficiency.
Key Features:
- Highly scalable and grows with your organization.
- Provides continuous visibility into all the applications in your entire infrastructure.
- Enables you to drill down to the specific metrics of an application with just a few clicks.
- Reduces the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).
- Comes with 150+ turn-key integrations.
- Provides contextual information for errors using strategies such as distributed tracing, live code profiling, and exception tracking.
- Offers intuitive dashboards for easy understanding and complete visibility of applications' performance.
- Provides proactive and advanced alerting options to stay on top of key metrics.
- Monitors both client-side and server-side applications.
Why do we recommend it?
AppOptics is highly recommended for its robust scalability and comprehensive visibility into application performance. It excels in reducing downtime and optimizing resource usage across diverse infrastructures, making it a reliable choice for continuous application monitoring.
Who is it recommended for?
This tool is ideal for organizations looking to monitor a wide range of applications, from legacy to custom-built, across various environments. It's especially suited for businesses seeking a scalable solution that offers detailed insights and analytics to enhance operational efficiency.
In all, AppOptics is a cost-effective and efficient tool for monitoring all applications across your infrastructure. Start a 30-day free trial.
Pros:
- Highly scalable, adapting to organizational growth.
- Provides continuous and detailed visibility across all applications.
- Allows quick access to specific application metrics.
- Effectively reduces Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).
- Features over 150 turn-key integrations for versatility.
- Advanced alerting options for proactive monitoring.
Cons:
- Might be complex for beginners to navigate initially.
4. Datadog APM
Datadog APM is a modern platform that's well-suited for monitoring different types of applications across your entire infrastructure. This tool offers end-to-end tracing of all your applications and even individual lines of code to provide a comprehensive view of your applications' performance at any time. Furthermore, Datadog APM correlates the frontend and backend data to monitor the dependencies that exist between applications. By combining information from these different sources, you can reduce downtime and latency, improve performance, and bring down maintenance costs.
Its real-time insights provide complete visibility into the state of your operations, so you can take the necessary action to meet your organization's goals. These insights also help with faster troubleshooting and proactive alerting.
Key Features:
- Enables you to monitor KPIs using custom tags.
- Helps to optimize your code, so your applications can perform better.
- Monitors different services and endpoints within your application to identify any bottlenecks in performance.
- Creates visual dependency maps with its Service Map feature.
- Comes with out-of-the-box dashboards for easy visibility and control.
- Integrates well with hundreds of third-party applications.
- Leverages OpenTelemetry and OpenStandards to manage applications.
- Reliable, flexible, and highly scalable.
- Retains only the most relevant information by using tag-based retention filters.
Why do we recommend it?
Datadog APM is highly recommended for its end-to-end application tracing and comprehensive monitoring capabilities. It excels in correlating frontend and backend data, which is crucial for understanding application dependencies and improving overall performance.
In all, Datadog APM is an advanced application monitoring platform that can quickly identify performance issues and provide the context for the same to ease troubleshooting. Its many features such as distributed tracing and live code analysis help to finetune applications and improve their performance. Datadog helps with reporting, auditing, and compliance as well.
Who is it recommended for?
This platform is particularly suited for organizations requiring detailed performance analysis across their entire infrastructure, from individual lines of code to complete application health.
Pros:
- Custom tags for monitoring KPIs enhance performance optimization.
- Identifies bottlenecks in services and endpoints effectively.
- Service Map feature creates visual dependency maps.
Cons:
- The comprehensive features might be overwhelming for smaller teams or less complex environments.
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Summary
To conclude, continuous monitoring of your applications is essential for not just the improved performance of your applications but also to ensure optimal resource utilization, reduced downtime, easy troubleshooting, and improved security. That said, it's not easy to manually monitor applications' performance and this is where automated application monitoring tools become critical.
However, choosing the appropriate application monitoring platform is not easy, and this is why we described the best choices available today. We hope they help you to decide the best fit for your organization's application monitoring requirements.