High availability and flawless performance of business applications are vital to maintaining a company’s online reputation and keeping its customers satisfied. If a business-critical application crashes, frustrated users may abandon the service, leading to a loss in brand value and revenue. Internal business application performance issues can also cause a drop in employee productivity.
To prevent these performance issues, enterprises turn to application performance monitoring solutions. APM tools help IT and DevOps teams resolve performance issues faster, improve resource utilization, increase application stability and uptime, and reduce the overall number of performance incidents.
Applications Manager monitors the key components of your applications to detect performance problems proactively so that you can take action before your users are affected. Let’s take a look at the key parameters monitored.
Application and server CPU usage
High CPU usage can indicate performance issues, such as inefficient code or resource-intensive processes.
Applications Manager assesses CPU usage, potential CPU bottlenecks, and memory allocation.
Application availability or uptime
Application availability indicates whether an application is online and available to users. It is determined based on KPIs such as overall system uptime and downtime, response time, number of transactions, and other relevant indicators. Performance issues such as timeouts, errors, and missing resources are constantly monitored and brought to the user’s attention.
Applications Manager monitors the application’s health status constantly and ensures that it is at an optimal performance level. When an application’s health status goes down, the user will be notified through an alarm immediately, allowing them to take necessary measures to ensure that a sudden downtime event doesn’t occur.
Request rate
The request rate is a measure of the number of requests an application handles. It allows you to monitor the number of active users in an application and keeps track of how an application deteriorates or fails at the software level. Tracking request rates can provide you with valuable insights into how your application is performing under different traffic loads. By correlating request rates with other application performance metrics, you will be able to interpret the performance of your application better.
Applications Manager arranges every application’s traffic into a table so users can access a variety of information in a single feature. Users can monitor spikes and drops in application traffic with easy-to-read graphs that record polled data spanning over separate time intervals.
Error rate
Keeping track of error rates is essential to know how often an application’s performance deteriorates. APM tools are equipped to enable error tracking along with transaction tracing to resolve issues quickly and keep users satisfied.
Applications Manager monitors your application’s performance around the clock and tracks errors in real time. It provides detailed graphs of an application’s error count at equal time intervals throughout the day.
A sudden increase or spike in the error rate can indicate that the system is about to experience a major malfunction or failure. By closely monitoring the error rate and taking corrective actions when necessary, you can prevent major problems and ensure that your application runs smoothly.
User satisfaction: Apdex score
User satisfaction reveals how your customers feel about an application when compared to a fixed baseline. Unlike more commonly known forms of performance measures such as average response time and throughput, the Application Performance Index (Apdex) value of an application is easy to interpret and can be used to analyze transactions that cause user dissatisfaction due to slow performance.
The Apdex score is calculated using the following formula:
Apdex defines three types of users based on their level of satisfaction:
- Satisfied: This rating stands for users who experienced satisfactory or high responsiveness with the application. These users were able to complete their tasks quickly and efficiently, without any major delays or frustration.
- Tolerating: This rating denotes users who have experienced sluggish but satisfactory responsiveness with the application. These users may have encountered some delays or minor issues but were still able to complete their tasks without significant frustration.
- Frustrated: This rating represents users who have encountered unacceptable responsiveness. These users experienced significant delays or issues that prevented them from completing their tasks, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction.
By categorizing application users into these three groups, businesses can identify areas of improvement and work towards enhancing the user experience of their applications. For instance, if many users fall under the “frustrated” category, the business can investigate and resolve the issues that are causing delays or preventing users from completing their tasks.
Applications Manager offers a clear outlook into this vital user-satisfaction score in the form of simple reports and graphs that record your application’s Apdex scores, down to the last percentile, for every minute of the day.
Monitor your application’s key metrics using Applications Manager
Applications often have multiple tasks running at a time, and keeping an eye on every one of them manually is not feasible. Leaving these applications unsupervised, however, can result in flawed application performance and a frustrated end-user experience.
Applications Manager’s ability to monitor key metrics of applications and spot performance issues before they snowball into something much more severe is a system must-have. Monitoring the key metrics of your applications is a major step toward improving your application performance as a whole. Download a 30-day, free trial of Applications Manager today and experience application monitoring at its best.
