In today’s fast-paced digital world, it is more important than ever to ensure that your business applications run smoothly. From managing internal operations to engaging with clients and promoting products and services, business applications have become an integral part of daily operations.
However, with the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of these applications, ensuring their smooth functioning can be a major challenge. Even a minor glitch or downtime can have a significant impact on productivity and customer satisfaction, and ultimately, mean loss of revenue for your business.
Application monitoring tools play a predominant role in maintaining your business applications by providing valuable insights that ensure they’re running at peak performance. By identifying potential performance issues before they impact end users, your IT team can take proactive steps to improve application performance and resolve issues instantly.
Whether you have a small business or a large enterprise, choosing the right application monitoring tool is crucial. However, selecting the right tool can be a daunting task, especially with so many features and options to consider. In this blog, we’ll break down the essential features to look for when evaluating an application monitoring tool and highlight what ManageEngine Applications Manager can offer your IT team.
What should you look for in an application monitoring tool?
When selecting an application monitoring tool, IT and DevOps teams should prioritize these key elements:
Real-time application and infrastructure monitoring
Real-time monitoring allows you to constantly monitor your application’s performance, giving you the ability to observe any changes or issues as they happen. Look for a tool that provides detailed traceability of transactions to help identify the root cause of performance issues. The tool should also monitor the health and performance of underlying infrastructure components like servers, networks, databases, and containers.
End-user experience monitoring
Understanding how users engage with your application reveals opportunities for enhancement. With a tool that offers detailed insights into end-user behavior and system performance, you can identify and resolve any problems that directly impact your users as well as make data-driven decisions to improve user experience and drive business growth.
Reliable and actionable alerts
The right application monitoring tool should have the ability to accurately pinpoint issues across your application stack and infrastructure and generate meaningful alerts, not false alarms. It should use AI and ML for dynamic thresholds that adapt to changing conditions instead of relying on fixed thresholds. Having a tool with a robust alerting system ensures that when alerts occur, they are addressed quickly by the relevant stakeholders.
Comprehensive analytics and reporting
Gaining an in-depth understanding of your application’s performance through comprehensive analytics and reports enables you to uncover usage trends, identify potential bottlenecks, and optimize your application’s performance. This information is crucial for making well-informed decisions and developing strategic plans to ensure the success of your application.
Integration and compatibility
When choosing a monitoring tool to add to your technology stack, it’s important to select one that seamlessly integrates with your current setup. This means that it should work well with your existing monitoring solutions, cloud platforms, and development environments for effective communication and data sharing, allowing for a more streamlined and efficient workflow.
Scalability
It is crucial to ensure that the application monitoring tool has the capability to grow and adapt alongside your application. This means it should be able to handle a larger user base and increased complexity without any difficulty. Keeping scalability in mind is essential to ensure the sustained success of your application in the long run.
How ManageEngine Applications Manager ticks all the boxes for your application monitoring needs
Now that we’ve explored what to consider while evaluating application monitoring tools, let’s take a look at what ManageEngine Applications Manager has to offer.
Application performance monitoring
Applications Manager offers deep application performance monitoring (APM) with byte code instrumentation that helps DevOps teams find and fix performance issues within complex, distributed applications. It provides deep insights into the performance and behavior of an application’s underlying code. These insights help to:
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Identify performance bottlenecks and slowdowns within the application code.
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Trace the execution path of transactions to pinpoint the root cause of issues.
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Understand how CPU, memory, and database queries are used at the code level.
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Catch errors, exceptions, and other anomalies within the application code.
Applications Manager offers other advanced monitoring capabilities, such as automated service maps, thread profiling, and custom transaction tracking, and can be used in development, quality assurance, and production environments. It supports applications written in Java, .NET, .NET core, Python, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby languages.
Application discovery and dependency mapping
To manage numerous applications in a business setting effectively, it is crucial for DevOps administrators to understand the individual components and dependencies between them, especially when resolving incidents. Obtaining a complete overview of the relationships among various resources and infrastructure elements within an application enables you to stay fully aware of your infrastructure functioning and swiftly identify affected resources during performance issues. This involves continually discovering applications on different servers, creating visual representations of their interconnections, and regularly updating these maps with newly-discovered resources to maintain accurate, real-time information.
Applications Manager’s application discovery and dependency mapping (ADDM) feature provides a holistic visualization of application relationships to help you with change impact analysis. You can also make use of its bidirectional CMDB integration capabilities to sync relationships with the CMDB of either your ServiceNow or ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus deployments.
Hybrid infrastructure monitoring
Critical business processes depend on a variety of resources like servers, databases, and application servers. And when one of these resources breaks, the entire system is vulnerable. The rise of cloud platforms and other cutting-edge technologies has brought about significant changes in the realm of infrastructure monitoring and has expanded to encompass a wide range of elements, including virtualized environments, cloud infrastructure, microservices, containers, and more.
Continuously monitoring the entire application stack, despite being time-consuming and costly, is vital to maintain business stability. Understanding the inner workings of the infrastructure components helps maintain the application’s needs and alerts you to possible problems, enabling better performance optimization, capacity planning, and cost control.
Applications Manager supports diverse and hybrid business infrastructures, including components like servers, databases, VMs, containers, load balancers, and more, regardless of whether they are on premises or running in the cloud. Its support ranges from traditional technologies like the IBM i and AS/400 operating systems to modern container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes.
Digital experience monitoring
Maximizing business success requires your application to have a well-optimized digital end-user experience. This involves closely monitoring both the front-end and back-end performance of your application.
By gaining a comprehensive understanding of your application’s front-end performance, you can gain valuable insights into its real-time operation and user engagement. With Applications Manager, you can consistently track the real user experience of web applications and gain real-time insights into their front-end performance. This allows you to analyze how users from different locations interact with your application.
Additionally, you can run synthetic tests on critical user paths and continuously monitor API endpoints to get a broader perspective on the end-user experience. This can result in increased user loyalty, cost savings, improved customer retention, and higher profits.
AI-powered alerting and reporting
Real-time alerts are a vital part of application monitoring, enabling prompt detection of performance problems during application downtime or slowdowns. Applications Manager’s AI-driven notifications help you reduce false alarms and alert noise, enabling you to focus on the incidents that matter. You can choose to receive Applications Manager’s real-time alerts through various channels, like email, SMS, Slack messages, and ITSM tool integrations.
Moreover, gaining comprehensive performance analytics of your application infrastructure is crucial for monitoring and evaluating application performance, especially in hybrid or microservices architectures. Applications Manager offers over 500 prebuilt reports that can be generated without the need for any coding or query language. You can visualize and publish these reports on custom, interactive dashboards and share them with relevant stakeholders in your business. 
Begin your APM journey with ManageEngine Applications Manager
In today’s highly competitive business environment, maintaining top performance for applications is essential for success. Applications Manager’s advanced application monitoring features allow you to stay ahead of the game by closely monitoring the overall performance of your crucial applications. This includes gaining in-depth understanding of their availability, speed, and user satisfaction in real time. By identifying and addressing potential roadblocks before they affect your clients, you can guarantee uninterrupted business operations and a smooth end-user journey.
Applications Manager is compatible with a wide variety of applications and infrastructure elements and fits well into the workflow of most organizations. It can scale up based on requirements and is used worldwide by both small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises.
If you’re new to Applications Manager, start with a free, 30-day trial and see how it can meet your organization’s unique monitoring needs.
