Application performance management, or APM, refers to the discipline within systems management that focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and service availability of software applications.
APM can be defined as process and use of related IT tools to detect, diagnose, remedy and report application’s performance to ensure that it meets or exceeds end-users’ and businesses’ expectations. Application performance relates to how fast transactions are completed on behalf of, or information is delivered to the end user by the application via a particular network, application and/or web services infrastructure.
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There are two main methods by which application performance is assessed for production applications. The first is measuring the resources used by the application. The second is measuring the response time of applications from the perspective of the end user.
Application performance management is related to end-user experience management and real user management in that measuring the experience of real users in the use of an application in production is considered by many as being the most valid method of assessing the performance of an application in production.
The use of application performance management is common for web applications written to JEE and Microsoft .NET platforms. All of the leading systems management vendors have JEE and .NET APM products in their portfolios. These APM for JEE and .NET based applications have the advantage of being able to measure response time from the perspective of the web server, and being able to provide root cause analysis for the likely causes of performance issues within the applications code executing in the JEE or .NET environment. Many of these products also have connectors that monitor the transaction flow from the business logic layer of the application to the database server, or to external interfaces like web services. Some of these vendors also have HTTP appliances in their product line that can decode transaction specific response times at the web server layer.
Dependency injection software development frameworks on JEE instrument an application to provide performance metrics automatically. For example, Spring-based JEE applications support management protocols to provide observed issues in application operation to a performance management tool/dashboard. SpringSource acquired APM-player Hyperic in 2009 to combine application development, automatic application instrumentation, and application performance management. Aspect Oriented Programming on JEE platforms enables automatic performance monitoring without instrumentation of the application. PushToTest TestMaker is an open source load testing solution that integrates with Glassbox, an open source application performance monitoring and troubleshooter application.
The difficult issues in APM currently revolve around two trends in the IT industry. The first is that for many enterprises, only a small fraction of their business critical applications are web based and written to JEE or .NET. For these enterprises who may have business critical applications like SAP that use "fat" Win32 clients, their APM need can only be met by engaging with vendors offering deep End User Experience monitoring for a specific set of enterprise applications. The second issue is that many applications systems are being virtualized, which has the effect of breaking the validity of time based performance metrics gathered within the guest OS where the application is running. This requires a totally new approach to APM tuned to the requirements of virtualized systems.
While there are a number of established vendors in the APM space, such as IBM and CA Technologies, as well as larger players like Microsoft and Oracle looking to grow in the market through strategic acquisitions, a number of startups have won venture capital funding with new, innovative approaches to the problem.[1] In December 2011, Gartner published a report on six newer vendors that are driving innovation in the APM market: Splunk, Netuitive, New Relic, BlueStripe, AppDynamics, ITRS Group, and ExtraHop Networks.[2]
According to Gartner research, Application Performance Management includes 5 distinct functional dimensions:[3]