APM Tools Comparison: The Buying Guide for IT

APM tools provide in-depth visibility and information that supports the optimization of your application, infrastructure, and user experience.

What are APM tools?

 

Application performance monitoring tools offer greater observability into your application and infrastructure by collecting performance metrics that can be translated into actionable insights. 

While standard profilers provide data during the development phase, APM tools provide code-level visibility into the front-ends and back-ends of your applications, resulting in a comprehensive understanding of performance and the end user experience. APM tools provide an analytics-driven approach to monitoring and managing both production and non-production applications, helping organizations efficiently troubleshoot and resolve issues, reduce costs, and improve the user experience. Application performance management is an essential component of a DevOps philosophy. Choose the right APM solution for your organization by evaluating your needs in the following categories: 

  • Price

  • Ease of use

  • SaaS or on-premise

  • Cloud compatibility (AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc.)

  • Technologies supported (Java, Apache, Python, SAP ABAP, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, etc.)


Tools to consider

Once you’ve assessed the specific needs of your organization based on size, skill-level, budget, and framework, it’s time to select the appropriate APM monitoring tools. Popular options include the following solutions: 

AppDynamics:

With an SaaS and an on-premise option, AppDynamics is an APM platform that uses analytics and end-to-end transaction tracing to determine how application performance impacts business outcomes.  AppDynamics captures hundreds of valuable metrics out of the box, without any instrumentation of code changes, through easily accessible custom dashboards. Dynamic baselining and accurate, real-time alerting offers a clear view of what optimal performance looks like for your system.

New Relic APM

New Relic is a SaaS-based application monitoring solution. With options that include APM for mobile apps, infrastructure monitoring, and advanced browser monitoring, New Relic offers code-level visibility and performance data. 

Retrace:

Stackify's SaaS APM tool was designed for developers, while still being affordable and easy to use for smaller teams. A tool called Prefix helps with writing and testing code, and detailed transaction traces help pinpoint the root cause of application issues.

Dynatrace:

Dynatrace is an SaaS or on-premises solution that uses machine learning to identify performance issues and visualize application topology and changes in real-time.  

AppOptics™ by SolarWinds:

TraceView offers advanced error-based alerting and reporting, as well as distributed transaction monitoring for a better understanding of how performance issues affect end-users. 

ManageEngine Applications Manager:

ManageEngine offers customizable dashboards, built-in KPI database monitoring, and the ability to scale up to 50,000 applications with its Enterprise Edition. 

DataDog:

Datadog APM is SaaS-based and easily deployed on most popular frameworks. Without a real user monitoring solution, Datadog is currently limited to server monitoring. Code-level visibility and real-time customizable dashboards are also offered. 


Why IT leaders choose AppD

The AppDynamics APM solution is a popular choice among IT leaders and stakeholders alike due to its unique ability to correlate performance issues with their impact on business operations through end-to-end transaction tracing. Align IT operations and business objectives to maximize profit while improving the user experience with an APM solution that offers full stack observability and contextual data.

The AppDynamics Business iQ tool helps build dashboards that automatically correlate application performance to business outcomes. The ability to derive an in-depth understanding of the impact of technical issues on business objectives allows IT teams to prioritize their work in a way that ultimately improves ROI.

The machine-learning cognition engine helps teams quickly diagnose the root cause of performance problems for a proactive approach to troubleshooting that reduces MTTR and increases customer satisfaction.

In short - AppDynamics offers a streamlined, integrated solution for visualizing, monitoring, and managing every component of your application. This comprehensive visibility helps optimize your application performance, user experience, and business outcomes.


Hear from our customers

 

“With AppDynamics, our mean time to detection went from hours to less than 10 minutes, which is a huge win for us.”

Nemo Hajiyusuf, Software Engineering Manager, Alaska Airlines

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