What is an APM tool? Why do we need such tools for our software applications? These are all good questions and a logical place to start your APM solutions journey.

Application Performance Management (APM) is about the management and monitoring of a software application’s performance. This covers everything from the backend to frontend processes. It helps developers with code-level diagnostics. It also aids business owners to measure end-user satisfaction levels.

But, is it also applicable to startup businesses? The answer: Yes.

The size of the application or business is not a requirement to deploy APM. An application failure could ruin any businesses—whether small, medium, or large organizations. Therefore, it is vital to use APM tools to ensure the health and well-being of your application.

Don’t let your APM tools gather dust!

Fortunately, technologies are improving slow application performance. Many employ APM solutions to enable rapid real-time problem identification and fixing. However, dealing with software that monitors another software’s performance is a tough process.

There are a variety of features ranging from basic aspects of monitoring to complex communication between servers and clients. And sometimes, startup owners make mistakes in buying APM tools.

Top 10 APM Tools

Before going into a buying spree, here are the top 10 APM tools with its features to help you with your business.

Stackify

Stackify is the brainchild of Matt Watson, who started its operation in 2012. Its headquarters is in Kansas, with remote team members from the Philippines.

Stackify provides application performance management using its Retrace and Prefix tools. With the help of these tools, Stackify shows unprecedented growth that caters to more than 1000 customers. These include small companies as well as huge companies in the software industry.

As a matter of fact, the 2016 Editors’ Choice Award by PC Magazine acknowledged Stackify for its rigorous effort in application performance management.

Key Features:

• Provides agent-based monitoring with code-level diagnostics to almost all major programming languages (e.g., .NET, Java, PHP, C++, Ruby, Python, etc.) and other known frameworks.
• Integrates with other tools and offers platform-friendly tools to run smoothly in various environments.
• Provides Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetics to measure and improve front-end application performance and end-user experience.
• Identifies the problems using extensive code-level performance tracing.
• Monitors extensively hybrid cloud deployment using virtual and container technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker.

ManageEngine Applications Manager

ManageEngine is a comprehensive application performance monitoring software from Zoho Corporation.

As most organizations rely on its enterprise IT management division, ManageEngine ensures the optimal performance of their IT infrastructure. It covers all aspects of IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, applications, and more.

Additionally, it works for complex and dynamic environments such as data centers and the cloud. It provides reliable performance insight into business-critical applications. Despite its robustness, it is easy to set up and user-friendly.

Key Features:

• Supports major programming languages such as Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and others.
• Performs multi-page end-user workflow simulation using synthetic transaction monitoring from multiple geographical locations.
• Provides extensive technical support for numerous applications and infrastructure elements.
• Resolves issues and identifies its root-cause using automated application discovery, tracing, and diagnostics (ADTD).
• Navigates applications seamlessly using the Service Map to reduce resolution time.

Datadog

Datadog APM enables optimization of your application. It provides comprehensive analysis and isolation of dependencies. Also, it removes bottlenecks, reduces latency, tracks errors, and increases code efficiency.

APM tools like Datadog have distributed traces to work seamlessly with browser sessions, exception logs, profiles, infrastructure metrics, etc. This provides developers and owners with full control of the application’s health across all hosts, containers, proxies, and serverless functions.

Key Features:

• Correlates all application performance to logs and underlying infrastructure metrics using one integrated platform.
• Provides 100% traceability and performs no sampling. All traces are processed and filter relevant traces using tag-based rules.
• Supports continuous profiling and provides an analysis of your application’s code-level performance across the entire stack. This includes most resource-consuming methods (CPU, memory, etc.) using tags, and correlating it with relevant requests and traces.
• Improves front-end application performance using Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetics.
• Supports auto-detection of anomalies to surface issues and reduces alert fatigue with Machine Learning-based Watchdog.

Sematext

Sematext APM provides real-time end-to-end control into your Web application performance by tracing individual and business transactions. It detects the slowest and under-performing elements of your application. Thus, it helps troubleshoot faster and improve the application’s user experience.

Key Features:

• Profiles how applications interact with underlying components, databases, and external services in real-time.
• Provides real-time alerts during the discovery of anomalies before it reaches the user side.
• Pinpoints root cause for performance issues using code-level visibility.
• Tracks and filters database operations to detect the most time-consuming transactions.
• Provides inter-component communication and its corresponding throughput, latency, error rates, etc.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics is an APM solution and IT operations analytics from Cisco. It offers clear visualization of performance levels, bottlenecks, and other analytics. Additionally, it provides comprehensive problem solving to complex and distributed applications across hybrid computing environments.

Key Features:

• Support languages like Java, Node.js, PHP, .NET, Python, C++, etc.
• Provides real-time alerts for business-critical issues with automatic performance diagnostics.
• Resolves production application performance issues through code-level monitoring.
• Provides fixes and resolutions to any issues identified.
• Tracks normal and problematic traces using intelligent alerts and response systems.

Opsview

The Opsview APM tools provide an easy-to-use dashboard for any applications. It supports multiple applications from multiple locations. With this setup, it is difficult to get performance data and optimum results. However, Opsview APM tools provide automated and unified algorithms to defy these challenging tasks.

Key Features:

• Provides applications’ health information and alerts for every process abnormality.
• Tracks the database availability and response metrics mechanisms.
• Connects with the clients’ host, database, and storage and provides performance metrics and traces.
• Ensures that business-critical applications meet the business’ Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Works efficiently with other Opsview products such as the Opsview mobile.

Dynatrace

Key Features:

• Supports .NET and Java and other major programming languages.
• Monitors end-to-end code-level investigation.
• Delivers excellent digital customer experience both for developers and business users.
• Resolves problems proactively before issues affect end-users.
• Integrates a proactive approach to reduce time to resolve the issues and saves resources.
• Uses artificial intelligence for error discovery.

Microsoft Application Insights

The tech giant Microsoft cements its reputation when it joins the APM tools bandwagon. Its Application Insights product helps organizations manage their application’s performance. This APM solution is developer-oriented with curated insights to help troubleshoot and improve applications’ performance.

Key Features:

• Works with major programming languages such as as.NET, C++, PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, etc.
• Supports different environments and platforms (from Windows-based applications to Android and iOS platforms.
• Monitors the response time for various requests, CPU, network, memory usage, etc.
• Provides powerful alerting systems such as response time, email, various communications channels, etc.
• Ensures application’s availability through its sophisticated dashboards.

New Relic

New Relic is an APM software built by Lew Cirne in 2008. It provides solutions to performance-related problems. It rapidly grew into one of the best tools for developers. Also, businesses and their IT support teams are using it to improve software performance.

Key Features:

• Supports major languages like Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, and PHP.
• Conducts performance management for Web and mobile apps, advanced browser performance, and other front-end monitoring.
• Provides performance metrics such as latency, throughput, exception logs, etc.
• Manages the performance of external micro-services, time-consuming transactions and its breakdowns, and cross-application tracing.
• Provides deployment analysis, error history, and logs comparison.

CA Technologies

CA Technologies APM tools support Web, mobile, cloud, and mainframe applications. It provides greater customer experience and primarily caters to enterprise customers.

Key Features

• Monitors application and simulates real user transactions easily.
• Safeguards the applications’ important data from performance analytics to real-time resolutions.
• Provides simplified detection and resolution mechanisms of issues resulting in reducing time and efforts.
• Implement better analytics compared with other APM tools.
• Provides stable and easy-to-use APM tools.

Using APM Tools to Succeed in a Competitive Market

There are thousands of ways to ensure the service quality of your software applications. APM tools can help you analyze, troubleshoot, and apply governance controls to every phase of development.

But the value of APM tools can’t be derived by its features or functions alone. Its market reputation and user experience is a huge factor to consider.

This is why Full Scale recommends Stackify as the leading APM tool to deliver rich software performance management sets. Stackify has Prefix and Retrace that come out-of-the-box with every purchase.

To wrap this up, are you a startup owner looking for the right APM tools? Visit Stackify to get the most comprehensive performance software management.

Or are you a startup owner wanting to know how APM tools work or build your APM software? Full Scale can help you with our pool of developers, project managers, and software testers.

Book a FREE consultation with us, and we can build your team quickly and affordably with our Guided Development program.