Collect telemetry data to get a deep understanding of application performance.
Application Performance Management or APM allows you to hook a plugin into your application to expose useful metrics that shed light on the health of your applications. Observability builds atop the legacy of APM tools with a framework for collecting telemetry data end-to-end, such as logs, traces, metrics, and events, at the infrastructure and application levels for analysis, visualization, and finding the root cause of issues in complex distributed systems.
With the rise of microservices architectures, tracking requests across multiple services and components becomes crucial for understanding application performance. This use case highlights the distributed tracing capabilities provided by APM and Observability vendors, enabling businesses to identify and troubleshoot performance issues across complex, distributed systems.
As IT infrastructures grow increasingly complex, monitoring and managing components such as servers, networks, storage, and virtual environments becomes essential. This use case focuses on providing comprehensive visibility into performance and health, allowing organizations to optimize resource usage and proactively address potential bottlenecks.
Log data provides valuable insights into application and infrastructure performance, security, and user behavior. This use case showcases the advanced log analytics capabilities offered by APM and Observability vendors, allowing organizations to aggregate, analyze, and visualize log data for faster and more informed decision-making.
Organizations need to ensure smooth and efficient application performance for a seamless user experience. This use case involves monitoring, detecting, and diagnosing performance issues in real-time, enabling businesses to address potential problems before they impact end-users.
Here is a comprehensive APM and Observability requirements checklist you can use to further define your use case.
Must provide a solution that can handle large-scale, complex enterprise environments.
Must offer a pricing plan that is appropriate for the specific use case, consumption patterns, and budget.
The solution should allow for dynamic instrumentation, use open source technologies, and enable the monitoring of specific parts of the application on-demand.
Must provide real-time, near real-time, or live metrics in the dashboard to help identify and troubleshoot issues as they occur.
Must integrate with other tools for alerting and issue tracking, such as PagerDuty or Jira.
Must meet industry-standard authentication and access control requirements.
Must meet compliance requirements for the relevant industry or regulatory standards.
Must monitor the status and usage of containers, such as Kubernetes.
Must offer multiple deployment options, such as on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid.
Must offer a wide range of observability tools, such as metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling, with high cardinality analytics and under developer control. It must also capture the code profile for every trace/transaction.
Must be able to handle and troubleshoot issues that may arise as the system grows in size and complexity.
The solution should be compatible with the existing system architecture.
Must support code profiling for a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks.
Must support logging for a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks.
Must support metrics collection for a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks.
Must support tracing for a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks.
Here are some of the more popular APM and Observability products.
Elastic's observability platform is built on search tools and the ELK stack, providing powerful monitoring capabilities for modern infrastructure. It offers comprehensive insights into system performance.
Highlight.io is a cutting-edge APM solution, offering real-time visibility into application behavior.
Honeycomb provides insights into real-time software behavior, surpassing traditional APMs. It has event-level system probing, and facilitates understanding of patterns and anomalies. It's ideal for rapid debugging in modern architectures.
Chronosphere delivers scalable and reliable observability, supporting organizations in managing complex environments.
Lumigo provides advanced observability for serverless architectures, enabling rapid issue resolution.
Splunk Observability Cloud delivers end-to-end visibility, tracing and AI-driven troubleshooting to aid in issue identification and resolution. It also facilitates continuous code profiling and service bottleneck identification.
Instana is part of the IBM portfolio and is unique in offering near-comprehensive real-time metric instrumentation, empowering users with precise and timely insights into their applications.
LogicMonitor provides end-to-end observability, ensuring visibility into IT infrastructure and application performance.
Sumo Logic is a cloud-native service offering real-time, machine data analytics across the application lifecycle. It facilitates automated monitoring, log management, and security analytics, aiding businesses to promptly address and resolve issues.
Grafana is a versatile observability platform, empowering users with comprehensive insights into system metrics.
New Relic, one of the original APM solutions, has rebuilt its product to meet the requirements of a modern observability platform, providing comprehensive monitoring and insights and data ingestion based pricing.
Logz.io is a comprehensive observability platform, offering real-time analytics for logs, metrics, and traces.
AppDynamics tightly integrates automation (AIOps) features with its APM, enabling organizations to automate processes and gain valuable insights into application performance.
DX APM focuses on traditional APM. While it excels in monitoring app performance, it's not a complete observability platform. DX APM offers insights into health, utilization, and user experience.
Dynatrace provides an APM that supports diverse languages, architectures, and applications. It offers real-time visibility into microservices, automatic discovery and monitoring of Kubernetes workloads, and end-to-end visibility.
SigNoz offers advanced observability, providing real-time insights into application performance.
Datadog, a cloud monitoring pioneer, offers a comprehensive portfolio of monitoring services including APM. It provides advanced monitoring solutions for cloud-native companies.
Formerly Lightstep, ServiceNow Cloud Observability is an observability platform specializing in monitoring and tracing challenges in microservice-based environments, enabling organizations to gain deep visibility into their distributed systems.
Compare products in APM and Observability head-to-head across various criteria such as price, features, user interface, support, ect.
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