Almost every business relies on an array of software applications and tools. Many businesses now work across different locations and handle thousands of users on each platform.
With that dependence, keeping Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems operational is the top priority.
That’s where application performance monitoring tools come into the picture. These ever-advancing and innovative tools ensure your systems function properly and work does not come to a halt.
Whether you’re looking for APM tools for your ECM system or code-level monitoring, this guide sheds light on the best APM solutions on the market across a variety of categories.
Table of Contents
- What is APM?
- Why Do Your Business Need APM Tools?
- 14 Best APM Tools for 2024
- Choosing the Right APM Tool for Your Needs
What is APM?
APM stands for Application Performance Monitoring. It refers to the practice of monitoring and managing the performance and user experience of software applications. APM tools collect data on various metrics such as response times, throughput, error rates, and resource utilization to provide insights into how well an application performs.
These tools offer real-time visibility into applications’ performance and underlying infrastructure. Organizations can detect and diagnose performance issues quickly by leveraging application performance monitoring.
These tools include features like;
- Alerting
- Analytics
- Diagnostics
- Transaction tracing
These capabilities help identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and ensure a positive user experience.
The result? Improved customer satisfaction and smoother business operations.
Why Do You Need APM Tools?
Even if you have an IT team in place, proactively looking at all the factors of your software and monitoring them is challenging and a drain on resources.
Here are four key reasons why having an APM tool helps.
Optimize Application Performance
APM tools help identify and troubleshoot performance issues, which enhances application health. This proactiveness enables quick identification of performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies. With features like transaction tracing and diagnostics, APM tools pinpoint specific areas of improvement, such as code-level issues or infrastructure constraints.
Improve User Experience
Most APM tools come with the functionality of seeing how end users are using different applications. This insight into response times, error rates, and transactions helps organizations identify and address problem areas. Your IT team can enhance application stability and ensure a smooth user experience.
Additionally, insights provided by APM tools lead to faster loading times, reduced latency, and better responsiveness. By monitoring and optimizing application performance, APM tools contribute to delivering a positive and seamless user experience.
Minimize Downtime and Save Costs
When a system crashes, your teams might be unable to serve your clients, leading to frustration. Worse, it can impact reputation and revenue. For example, imagine the chaos that could ensue if a bank’s employees cannot access their ECM system where the documents are stored and managed.
APM tools are a lifesaver in this respect and cut downtime. They alert you in advance of potential problems, which can even help eliminate downtime.
Drive Business Growth
APM tools integrate with many systems and workflows to ensure your application runs optimally. Improved application performance enhances user satisfaction, retention, and loyalty, increasing customer acquisition and retention.
Additionally, APM tools enable businesses to identify opportunities for optimization and innovation, allowing for the development of new features or services to meet evolving customer needs. This facilitates a seamless user experience, enhancing competitiveness and sustainable business growth.
14 Best APM Tools for 2024
Now that we know the benefits of APM tools let’s look at the top 14 APM tools, each geared towards a different need or requirement.
1. Reveille – Best For ECM Monitoring
While not considered a traditional APM tool, Reveille is the undoubted leader when it comes to ECM (Enterprise Content Management) monitoring solutions that offer comprehensive insights into the performance and usage of ECM platforms like OnBase, SharePoint, Documentum, TotalAgility, and many more.
It offers your team real-time visibility into system health, user activity, and content access patterns. It tracks key performance data such as response times, document upload/download speeds, and system availability to ensure optimal performance.
Reveille also has a platform geared towards user analytics, which analyzes user behavior and detects unusual activity or potential security threats. By providing proactive alerts and detailed analytics, Reveille helps organizations optimize ECM performance, enhance user productivity, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
2. AppDynamics APM – Best For Real User Monitoring
AppDynamics aids in real-user monitoring (RUM) by providing visibility into the actual experiences of end-users interacting with web and mobile applications. It uses Experience Journey Mapping (ExJM) to chart the most trafficked application paths and evaluate their performance. This lets you see how end users interact with your app and identify opportunities for optimization.
This data helps identify user experience issues across various devices, browsers, and geographies. Additionally, AppDynamics correlates RUM data with application performance metrics, infrastructure health, and business outcomes, providing a comprehensive view of application performance and its impact on user satisfaction and business success.
3. Datadog APM – Best For Security Monitoring
DataDog aids security monitoring by providing comprehensive visibility into an organization’s infrastructure, applications, and user activities. Through its security monitoring features, DataDog collects and analyzes logs, metrics, and traces in real-time to detect and alert on security threats and anomalies.
It also offers built-in integrations with security tools and platforms, allowing for seamless aggregation and correlation of security data across the entire tech stack. This lets your team quickly identify unauthorized access, abnormal behavior, and potential security breaches. Additionally, it provides detailed audit trails and forensic analysis capabilities to investigate incidents thoroughly.
4. Dynatrace – Best For Analytics
Dynatrace offers two divisions of analytics: business analytics and security analytics. Business analytics tracks business KPIs, detects process anomalies, reduces process errors, and reports on your business health. Security analytics prioritizes threat hunts, accelerates incident investigation, investigates cloud security events at scale, and automates responses to exploit attempts.
This becomes possible using advanced AI algorithms, with which the tool can analyze vast amounts of data in real-time and correlate metrics across the entire technology stack. This approach enables Dynatrace to detect anomalies, identify root causes of issues, and provide actionable insights for optimization.
5. New Relic APM – Best For Infrastructure Monitoring
New Relic APM lets you detect issues across cloud and on-prem infrastructure and know system health in a snap. It also helps quantify the impact radius of every incident, such as the impact of app deployment on hosts.
The New Relic application performance management tool helps identify correlations between application behavior and infrastructure metrics by collecting and analyzing server performance, resource utilization, and network activity data.
The tool also offers customizable dashboards and alerting mechanisms, enabling organizations to monitor key infrastructure metrics in real-time and respond promptly to any anomalies or deviations from expected behavior. They also have dynamic charts that show host and APM metrics that help correlate drops in performance.
6. SolarWinds AppOptics – Best For IT Service Management
SolarWinds AppOptics provides a modern IT service management solution (ITSM) with different use cases like service request management, help desk ticketing, IT asset management, remote Windows administration, active directory management, and desktop management. It provides comprehensive visibility into performance metrics, traces, and logs across the technology stack.
With customizable dashboards, alerting, and reporting features, AppOptics enables proactive monitoring and rapid incident response. It also integrates seamlessly with IT service management (ITSM) tools like ServiceNow and Jira and streamlines incident management and problem resolution workflows.
This solution empowers IT teams to maintain service reliability, optimize performance, and deliver a superior user experience.
7. Raygun APM – Best For Crash Reporting
Raygun APM excels in crash reporting by helping businesses detect, diagnose, and resolve errors. Through its robust monitoring capabilities, Raygun APM can monitor your full tech stack across desktop and mobile apps. It captures real-time crash data, including stack traces, error messages, and contextual information. This data is then aggregated and analyzed to identify patterns and trends in application failures.
Raygun APM offers customizable dashboards and alerting features, allowing teams to prioritize errors based on the number of occurrences and users affected. Additionally, it supports all major programming languages and frameworks and integrates with relevant tools to build a seamless error detection and resolution workflow.
8. Sentry – Best For Code-Level Monitoring
Sentry is a proactive application monitoring platform that is specifically built for developers. It helps you find the root cause of your code problems. For example, it lets you know the environment, device, OS, and the commit that led to an error. You can even find your slowest spans and see operations that consume the most time.
This granular data allows developers to pinpoint the exact line of code causing the issue, enabling rapid diagnosis and resolution. Sentry offers customizable alerts and notifications, empowering teams to monitor critical code paths and respond to issues promptly. Additionally, Sentry integrates seamlessly with development workflows and tools, facilitating automatic error reporting and issue tracking.
9. ManageEngine Applications Manager – Best For IT Operations Management
ManageEngine aids IT operations management by providing comprehensive solutions for monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing IT infrastructure and services. With its suite of tools, ManageEngine offers visibility into network performance, server health, application availability, VPN activity & usage, physical and virtual server performance metrics, etc.
Its centralized dashboard enables IT teams to monitor and manage diverse systems and devices from a single interface. It also runs compliance checks to ensure you’re meeting industry standards.
Overall, ManageEngine empowers IT operations teams to maintain high service levels, ensure infrastructure reliability, and deliver exceptional user experience.
10. Site24X7 APM Insight – Best For All-In-One Monitoring
Site24x7 facilitates all-in-one monitoring by offering a comprehensive suite of tools to monitor various aspects of IT infrastructure and services. It provides monitoring for websites, servers, networks, applications, and cloud environments from a single platform.
With Site24x7, users can track performance metrics, detect outages, and troubleshoot issues across different components of their IT ecosystem. In a nutshell, the tool lets you monitor the performance of internet services, stay on top of outages & server issues, monitor critical network devices, gauge the application experience of real users, and harness the power of AI.
11. Scout APM – Best For Monitoring Development Platforms
Scout APM supports Ruby, Python, PHP, Elixir, and NodeJS technologies. The tool helps trace logic that ties bottlenecks to the specific code line, causing an error. It also lowers your overheads by providing an agent that speaks your language and instruments the dependencies you need at cost-effective rates.
With its lightweight and developer-friendly instrumentation, Scout APM seamlessly integrates into development environments, allowing developers to monitor code performance in real-time. Scout APM also identifies slow database queries and inefficient code paths, enabling developers to optimize application performance early in the development lifecycle.
12. Instana – Best For Database Monitoring
Instana aids in database monitoring by providing comprehensive visibility into the performance and health of databases within complex application environments. Through its automatic discovery and dependency mapping capabilities, Instana identifies all databases and their connections, ensuring complete coverage.
It continuously monitors key performance metrics such as query execution times, throughput, and resource utilization. Instana’s AI-powered analytics detect anomalies and performance degradation, allowing for proactive issue resolution before they impact application performance. Additionally, Instana offers deep insights into database dependencies and interactions with other components, facilitating root cause analysis and troubleshooting.
13. Gibraltar Software Loupe – Best For Centralized Log Aggregation
Gibraltar Software Loupe integrates with your tech stack and captures errors, what actions led to those errors, and application metrics. The tool’s full-text search and filters let you find issues associated with a computer, user, session, application version, etc. Its logging and error reporting integration offers a distinctive blend of centralized log management with automated error analysis.
Moreover, Loupe exhibits exceptional efficiency and reliability, particularly in production environments. All data captured by Loupe undergoes buffering initially in memory before being stored on the local disk. This approach ensures remarkable speed and resilience, guaranteeing that no data is lost even during network disruptions.
14. eG Innovations – Best For End User Experience Monitoring
eG Innovations aids in user experience monitoring by providing comprehensive visibility into the performance of digital services and applications from the end-user perspective. Through its monitoring solutions, eG Innovations captures and analyzes key metrics related to user interactions, such as response times, page load times, and transaction completion rates.
This data is then correlated with backend infrastructure metrics to identify issues affecting user experience. By providing insights into application performance and user behavior, eG Innovations empowers organizations to deliver exceptional digital experiences, improve customer satisfaction, and drive business success.
Choosing The Right APM Tool For Your Needs
As companies become more reliant on software and produce and manage more and more data, APM tools are essential to help monitor the health of applications and ECM systems.
The right APM tool will help your team detect and resolve issues before they hamper your end users or cause system failures. Better yet, improved application performance and user experience keep your business competitive and efficient in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
If you want to know more about Reveille’s ECM monitoring features and functionalities, contact us today or keep up with the latest developments on our news page.