Best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools in 2023

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 2023 available:

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is a structured log management platform based on ClickHouse. It allows you to start collecting, analyzing, and visualizing logs in real-time. Better Stack 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. Better Stack helps you to build better software faster with its advanced built-in collaboration features, resource-efficient ClickHouse, and a visually pleasing, dark-mode UI.

Better Stack Logs is a part of the Better Stack ecosystem, and together with Better Stack 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.

Read a more in-depth analysis of Sentry.

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.

We've taken a closer look on New Relic's APM in a side-by-side comparison with Datadog.

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.