Best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools in 2022
Application Performance Management and Monitoring tools enable code-level observability, faster recovery, troubleshooting, and easier maintenance of your service.
Measuring the performance of your applications is handled by tracking logs and performance metrics from all around your infrastructure in a logical manner, allowing for understanding errors in context and tracing them across your infrastructure to the root cause.
Main benefits of Application Performance Monitoring Tools
- APM tools help to monitor and improve key metrics such as MTTA and MTTRs
- APM data enable an evidence-backed decision-making process when scaling and further developing the application
- Application performance monitoring is an integral part of any observability suite
The global application ecosystem grows in complexity by the minute, and APM solutions are catching up. Here are some of the best Application Performance Monitoring tools in 2022 available:
1. Logtail
Logtail is a structured log
management platform based on ClickHouse. It allows you
to start collecting, analyzing, and visualizing logs in real-time. Logtail
collects data from any of the most popular
languages and frameworks such as Python and Django, JavaScript and Node.js, PHP,
Ruby, .NET, and more. Logtail helps you to build better software faster with its
advanced built-in collaboration features, resource-efficient ClickHouse, and a
visually pleasing, dark-mode UI.
Logtail is a part of the Better Stack ecosystem, and together with Better Uptime, they create a complete observability solution with incident management built-in. With one-click Better Uptime integration, you can easily alert on-call team members of any irregularities in your application's behavior. Be it a specific log message error or a predefined usage trend.
2. AppDynamics
Cisco's AppDynamics allows you to
monitor business-related metrics, user experience, and application performance.
AppDynamics offers complete visibility into the entire application ecosystem
enriched by intelligent insights and instant root-cause analysis to pinpoint the
source of issues in real-time.
3. Instana
Instana's an IBM solution for
monitoring. Its APM allows you to optimize performance using automatically
contextualized observability data. It automatically discovers, maps, and
monitors dependencies across the infrastructure.
Instana leverages automation for fast incident resolution and performance monitoring. It also allows for software version impact assessment and monitoring.
4. Sentry.io
Sentry's performance monitoring offers
support for various application languages and frameworks and is available both
as a SaaS and Self-hosted platform.
Sentry offers end-to-end distributed trace monitoring to trace performance issues to their origin.
5. Dynatrace
Dynatrace's all-in-one monitoring
solution also offers an APM tool for automated observability for cloud-native
services. It offers automated discovery and mapping, end-to-end observability,
multiplatform app monitoring, and root-cause and impacts analysis.
It's a feature-packed, enterprise-ready monitoring solution, which often makes it quite pricey and painful to start with.
6. Azure App Insights
Microsoft Azure Monitor features Application
Insights. This APM tool allows you to collect, analyze and evaluate telemetry
data from Azure and on-premise environments.
It will enable you to store and analyze telemetry. The Azure monitor offers a centralized, managed, and flexible data store. Azure's analytic engine allows you to create predictions, simulate them and reveal hidden patterns and dependencies.
App Insights allow you to:
- Automatically detect performance issues
- Diagnose issues with insights from analytics
- Observe user behavior
- Monitor .NET, Node.js, Java, and Python apps, and more
7. New Relic
New Relic offers a complete
monitoring solution covering APM, K8s monitoring, ML Model Monitoring, Log
Management, Synthetics, and more. Their Application Performance Monitoring
allows you to navigate and visualize your stack, and it offers most of the
features you'd expect from such a popular APM monitoring tool.
8. Splunk APM
Splunk's APM offers an application performance monitoring and troubleshooting solution for cloud-native microservice-based apps. It promises full-fidelity, 100% tracing, and an AI root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and discovery and mapping.
Since Splunk belongs among the founding members and active contributors to OpenTelemetry, Splunk APM supports open, vendor-neutral instrumentation, allowing for even more flexibility.
9. AppOptics
Solarwinds offers multiple
operation-specific APM tools, such as SAM or AppOptics. AppOptics offers
on-prem, hybrid, and cloud-based, distributed applications monitoring. It allows
you to combine dashboards to visualize metrics from application and
infrastructure in one place and eventually offers consolidated monitoring for
all server, host, containers, and serverless environments.
SolarWinds' AppOptics offers an Application Performance Monitoring for Java, .Net, Python, PHP, Scala, Node.js, Ruby, and Golang applications.
10. SigNoz
SigNoz is an MIT-licensed, open-source
alternative to many APM tools. It's a full-stack observability tool allowing you
to monitor metrics and traces, with Log management on the way. SigNoz supports
OpenTelemetry for instrumentation and offers out-of-the-box charts and
visualizations. It runs on either Kafka+Druid or OLAP database ClickHouse for
the backend. The Query service is built-in GO, and the frontend is
Typescript-powered.
11. Datadog
Datadog is one of the most popular and
successful monitoring solutions available. Its APM allows you to monitor apps
across browsers, platforms, databases, or lines of code. It works well with both
frontend and backend monitoring data and reports on performance-related issues,
dependencies, health, and business metrics.
Datadog works best as a part of the full Datadog stack, is enterprise-ready, and belongs among the most expensive solutions available.
12. The ELK Stack APM
Elastic APM is built upon the ELK stack.
It's composed of open source libraries for collecting performance data, a
server, receiving performance data, Elasticsearch, and Kibana for visualization.
13. Jaeger
Built by Uber and then donated to CNCF, Jaeger
is a Dapper-inspired, distributed tracing system allowing you to monitor and
troubleshoot microservice-based distributed systems. Jaeger supports two
open-source NoSQL database backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Jaeger allows
you to perform root cause analyses, analyze server dependencies, optimize
performance and latency and monitor transactions.
14. ManageEngine APM
Applications Manager offers
standard APM with support for Java, .Net Core, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby
applications. It also offers synthetic transaction monitoring with
Selenium-based scripting, real browser checks from Chrome and Firefox, and
multiple test locations.
However, Applications Manager is available only in two editions, the professional and enterprise, and both are quite expensive.
Conclusion
Nowadays, APM is essential for delivering a reliable and successful microservices-based application in a sustainable fashion. Many SaaS solutions offer instrumentation for easier deployment and a 15 to 30-day trial period, so you can get your hands on it and find what works for you the most. Open-source tools, on the other hand, bring in a lot of freedom and customizability, accompanied by infrastructure costs.
dashboards with Grafana.
dashboards with Grafana.
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