DevOps

The Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring Solutions

Application Performance Monitoring Solutions monitor and analyze the performance of applications, providing insights into response times, resource utilization, and user experiences to optimize performance.

The Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring Solutions include:
  • 1. Cisco AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring
  • 2. Alluvio Aternity by Riverbed
  • 3. Azure Monitor
  • 4. Broadcom DX Application Performance Management
  • 5. Datadog Application Performance Monitoring
  • 6. Dynatrace Application Monitoring
  • 7. Elastic Observability
  • 8. New Relic APM 360
  • 9. Progress WhatsUp Gold
  • 10. Splunk APM

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions analyze application logs, speed, networks, hosts, response times, security metrics, and end-user activity. If key performance baselines aren’t met, alerts can be sent to admins, alerting them that an issue has been detected. APM solutions allows teams to identify and remediate issues that may impact the end user experience of specific applications. Ultimately, application performance monitoring is an integral part of the development process, ensuring applications are working as expected.

APM solutions can offer a variety of features designed to make it easier for admins to measure application performance. This can include end-to-end observability of application behavior, mapping of application structures, real-time end-user activity monitoring, API management capabilities, and container monitoring. With these features, developers and IT operations teams can continuously monitor application performance to ensure end-users or employees are able to effectively navigate your applications. Additionally, APM platforms can be integrated with other IT management tools to provide a holistic view of the application landscape.

As a critical component of delivering an effective and high-performing application, the APM market is competitive, with a number of strong service offerings available. In this article, we’ll explore the top application performance monitoring solutions for businesses, considering key features, such as end-to-end observability, ease-of-use, and analytics, based on our own technical market research.

Cisco Logo

Cisco AppDynamics is a leading Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution, delivering business-critical information to the right teams, in the right context. The platform connects IT teams to business results with end-to-end observability of code-level transactions affecting key performance indicators (KPIs), such as conversion and revenue.

AppDynamics’ Cognition Engine uses machine learning to automate anomaly detection and significantly reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) with instant root cause diagnostics. The solution also enables confident cloud migration with real-time, automated performance insights before, during, and after the process, simplifying even the most complex hybrid environments.

AppDynamics is trusted by leading enterprises for proactive resolution of critical end-user issues, and observability across the entire business application ecosystem. The platform provides real-time visibility into application issues, from third-party APIs down to code-level problems, allowing IT teams to quickly identify and resolve issues affecting key business metrics.

Cisco Logo
Riverbed Logo

Alluvio Aternity by Riverbed offers a comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution, providing high-definition visibility to end users, applications, networks, and the cloud-native ecosystem. It features end user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and OpenTelemetry, making it suitable for both on-premise and cloud-based environments.

The Alluvio Aternity APM solution delivers comprehensive app performance insights, allowing users to trace every transaction from user to back-end and quickly fix code, SQL, or resource utilization issues. It also offers user experience and business insights, enabling organizations to understand user satisfaction, application usage trends, and the financial impact on their business. The platform provides complete visibility into cloud-native ecosystems such as Docker, Kubernetes, Pivotal Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

With an early warning alert system, Alluvio Aternity APM ensures users are notified of potential application issues and vulnerabilities. It stores a record of every transaction and its associated system metrics, enabling users to reconstruct past incidents and initiate decisive actions to fix problems. Additionally, the platform supports OpenTelemetry, granting DevOps teams the flexibility to embed observability using Jaeger, Zipkin, or other standards-based approaches.

Riverbed’s Alluvio Aternity APM is an all-inclusive monitoring solution that unifies insights across various aspects of application performance, enabling them to optimize user experiences and make informed decisions.

Riverbed Logo
Azure logo

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution designed for collecting, analyzing, and responding to monitoring data from cloud and on-premises environments. It enables users to optimize the performance and availability of their applications and services by providing insights into their system’s health. Azure Monitor collects data from every layer of the system, aggregating it across multiple Azure and non-Azure subscriptions and tenants.

The solution monitors various resources such as applications, virtual machines, guest operating systems, containers, databases, security events, and custom sources. It is compatible with both Azure and non-Azure environments, including on-premises data centers and other cloud providers. Azure Monitor can also export monitoring data for integration with third-party and open-source monitoring and visualization tools, as well as ticketing and ITSM systems.

Azure Monitor achieves observability by correlating data from multiple sources and aggregating it across the entire set of monitored resources. It stores data in separate stores for metrics, logs, traces, and changes. Users can access the monitoring data through the Azure portal, which provides a visual interface for navigating the tools, insights, and visualizations offered by Azure Monitor.

In addition to providing insights and visualizations, Azure Monitor supports proactive responses to critical events, either by notifying administrators or initiating automated processes to address issues. The solution also offers integration capabilities with various Azure services to enhance its monitoring and response capabilities, including AI-driven operations and alerting systems.

Azure logo
Broadcom Logo

Broadcom’s DX Application Performance Management (DX APM) proactively identifies and resolves issues across various application types, including physical, virtual, container, cloud, and mobile. By integrating AI/ML capabilities, DX APM correlates and analyzes data across users, applications, infrastructure, and network services. This helps reduce noise and false alarms, improving the organization’s focus on impactful issues.

The DX APM solution offers comprehensive, full-stack monitoring and analytics for improved user experiences. It provides insights into digital experience, performance, and app usage. With automated discovery, tracing, and mapping of application dependencies, DX APM offers metric correlation, crashes, code level insights, and diagnostic details across all layers. The solution is especially effective for monitoring modern application architectures, instantly detecting and monitoring microservices-based clusters, projects, services, pods, or containers, along with hosted apps and supporting infrastructure or cloud services.

DX APM facilitates collaboration across DevOps teams by sharing easily accessible performance data at every stage of the software lifecycle. Integrations with Runscope, BlazeMeter, and Jenkins further enhance collaboration between application and operations teams. Additionally, the solution achieves enterprise scale and administration through its open and scalable architecture, making it suitable for cloud service providers, managed service providers, or large enterprises.

Broadcom Logo
DataDog Logo

Datadog Application Performance Monitoring (APM) offers AI-powered code-level distributed tracing for various applications, from browsers and mobile apps to backend services and databases. By correlating traces with logs, metrics, real user monitoring data, security signals, and other telemetry, Datadog APM enables faster root cause detection and resolution, improved application performance and security posture, optimized resource consumption, and more effective team collaboration for optimal user experiences.

With code-level distributed tracing, users can quickly identify root causes by correlating traces with logs, infrastructure metrics, and database queries. Users can enhance code performance with visibility into execution time and resource consumption, while tracking and alerting on KPIs using span-based metrics with any tag. Datadog APM also helps teams improve service performance by providing a centralized view of dependencies, infrastructure, and databases, enabling proactive application reliability improvements, and efficient incident remediation.

Datadog APM supports multiple application deployment strategies, allowing users to track performance changes before, during, and after a release to ensure smooth software updates. By automatically aggregating health metrics by code version, users can quickly identify performance degradations and prioritize issues using Error Tracking features.

Watchdog AI, a component of Datadog APM, offers automated root cause analysis, reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and resolve (MTTR) incidents. It alerts users to anomalies, outliers, and potential future performance changes. Finally, Datadog APM reduces security risks by detecting vulnerable open-source libraries in production and providing a severity score based on vulnerability exposure, CVSs, and live threat activity.

DataDog Logo
Dynatrace Logo

Dynatrace is an application monitoring solution that helps businesses identify and resolve issues in real-time. With full-stack monitoring capabilities, Dynatrace covers the entire range of an application – from front-end to back-end, infrastructure, and cloud environment. By utilizing auto-detection and tracking transactions across all tiers, this solution allows users to monitor real user experiences, application performance, and infrastructure metrics.

Dynatrace supports a broad range of applications, providing coverage for entire hybrid, multi-cloud environments without any gaps or blind spots. This includes monitoring applications down to the code level, analyzing real user data, and leveraging actionable artificial intelligence to resolve problems quickly. Supported technologies include AWS, Android, Microsoft Azure, Docker, and more.

Dynatrace offers unique features, such as continuous auto-discovery, to minimize operational costs and provide detailed information on performance issues. By automatically learning how applications perform, Dynatrace proactively detects anomalies and pinpoints problems to individual lines of code. Using artificial intelligence, the system provides insights into response times, database calls, threading, and complexity to help businesses resolve customer experience issues proactively.

Dynatrace Logo
Elastic Logo

Elastic Observability is an AI-powered platform designed to unify metrics, logs, traces, and profiling. Built on the well-known ELK Stack, it allows businesses to gather insights from various data sources with ease.

Elastic Observability enables users to automate anomaly detection, accelerate root cause analysis, and adopt cloud-native architectures confidently. Through the platform’s AI and machine learning capabilities, users can swiftly identify and resolve issues across their applications and infrastructure. Elastic Observability supports over 350 integrations, including native support for popular cloud services and open-source projects such as OpenTelemetry.

The platform also provides end-to-end visibility into hybrid environments, assisting businesses in migrating their applications to the cloud. With Elastic Observability, organizations can monitor their cloud-native ecosystems – from Kubernetes to serverless – and investigate performance issues in seconds.

Elastic Observability covers a wide range of monitoring use cases, from log monitoring and analytics to application performance monitoring and infrastructure monitoring. This versatile solution also offers synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, and universal profiling to optimize computational efficiency and provide a comprehensive view of user interactions and system performance.

Elastic Logo
New Relic logo

New Relic APM 360 is a comprehensive application monitoring platform aimed at providing businesses with valuable insights into the performance of their applications and infrastructure. It offers a unified view of telemetry data across the entire development and application stack, allowing engineers to quickly identify and address performance issues.

New Relic APM 360 provides in-depth visibility into application health by monitoring essential metrics, visualizing dependencies, and identifying issues through alerts and error tracking. It enables businesses to monitor user experience in real-time by incorporating key transactions, browser monitoring, and synthetic checks. This platform fosters collaboration across teams by providing insight into the impact of deployment changes and application vulnerabilities, as well as improving team efficiency through integrated telemetry data.

The New Relic APM platform streamlines the debugging process by offering a unified view of the entire stack, allowing engineers to quickly detect root causes and untangle complexity using distributed tracing features. The solution ensures comprehensive coverage and improves visibility across the infrastructure, thereby reducing the risk of undetected issues.

With support for over 600 integrations, automatic instrumentation, and compatibility with OpenTelemetry, the platform provides businesses with a flexible, connected experience for their data monitoring needs.

New Relic logo
Progress Logo

Progress WhatsUp Gold is an IT infrastructure monitoring software that provides visibility to everything connected to a network, from on-premise to cloud environments. The platform aids in avoiding downtime, catching network issues before they arise, and troubleshooting efficiently with an interactive topology map that displays connectivity and dependencies.

WhatsUp Gold can monitor devices such as servers, routers, storage, wireless, virtual, and cloud, as well as applications by alerting and reporting on performance and response times. The software also enables the analysis of network traffic to identify bandwidth demands and suspicious connections. It also manages configurations to automate backup and restoration processes.

The solution enables teams to find and fix problems quickly with instant views of network devices, systems, and applications, as well as smarter alerting through SMS, email, web, or Slack. WhatsUp Gold automatically discovers and maps networks resources, connectivity, and dependencies, while custom dashboards empower teams to access data and take action with ease. Customizable alerts let users stay ahead of network performance issues and resolve them before service tickets are generated.

Progress WhatsUp Gold is trusted by hundreds of thousands of enterprises, including 1,700 software companies and 3.5 million developers.

Progress Logo
Splunk Logo

Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a solution designed to help businesses identify, troubleshoot, and optimize applications, whether they are monolithic or microservice-based. With real-time alerting, detection, and visualization capabilities, Splunk APM assists in pinpointing issues related to deployments, updates, or configurations across the entire distributed system. Splunk also offers AI-directed guidance for troubleshooting so that users can quickly locate the source of problems, navigate between traces and logs, and identify areas for improvement in performance.

Splunk APM offers various features such as end-to-end visibility, complete distributed tracing, service mapping, tag spotlight, and business workflow tracking. These tools enable users to effectively troubleshoot complex environments and better understand their applications’ performance and dependencies. Additionally, dynamic alerting capabilities help reduce alert storms and ensure teams can address performance issues more efficiently.

The “AlwaysOn” code profiling feature in Splunk APM provides continuous code-level analysis combined with trace data, enabling users to identify bottlenecks and find optimization opportunities in both cloud-native and monolithic applications. With Splunk APM, businesses can effectively monitor their applications and proactively address any issues, resulting in improved end-user experience and overall performance.

Splunk Logo
The Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring Solutions