What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?
Application performance monitoring (APM) is the practice of defining and monitoring key metrics about an application’s health to meet performance expectations for availability and user experience. In the context of WordPress VIP, APM is a key component of maintaining highly available content publishing and management tools that load quickly and respond to user interaction without delays, errors, or timing out.
APM provides a level of detail that allows teams to identify which parts of an application are non-performant and understand where to prioritize optimization. APM provides visibility from the user session layer all the way to the code that makes up an application.
In this post, we will cover the importance of application performance monitoring, with details about how APM works and examples of different kinds of APM.
How application performance monitoring works
Application performance monitoring is the system used to determine what metrics are important to the performance of your applications coupled with a plan to monitor and measure those performance metrics. Establishing an application performance monitoring plan starts with defining which components and services are important to measure.
Application performance monitoring is the measurement of the key metrics in a performance monitoring plan. Using monitoring tools to capture data, a baseline is established. Monitoring continues sampling data to detect any anomalies throughout the application stack that might result in performance issues. WordPress VIP includes this monitoring as part of our service offering.
Types of application performance monitoring
Application performance monitoring measures data that represents impact to actual user experience. It does this by leveraging agents, which are pieces of code that sample performance data and send the data to a backend service to be compared against healthy baseline measurements. This data sampling is sometimes referred to as telemetry. Three common types of monitoring by agents include digital experience, application, and database monitoring.
Digital experience monitoring
This type of APM tracks things like load time, response time, uptime, and downtime as experienced by real users on actual devices. This is often done in combination with synthetic testing, which simulates the experience of a user to detect issues before they impact actual users in production. Digital experience monitoring tracks usage of both mobile apps and browser-based applications.
Application monitoring
This type of APM provides telemetry on all aspects of the application stack, including the application framework, operating system, web server, database, APIs, and middleware. It also samples data from the IT infrastructure around things like CPU utilization, disk space, and network performance. Application stack monitoring often includes code-level tracing, which makes it possible to identify code causing performance bottlenecks.
Database monitoring
This type of APM samples the performance of running SQL queries for responsiveness and query execution efficiency. It also monitors for errors in addition to the database monitoring that happens within application monitoring.
Why application performance monitoring is important
Application performance monitoring is important to make sure users, both the ones creating content as well as the ones engaging with content, have an optimal experience.
Modern applications are frequently made up of multiple containerized microservices distributed across a cloud environment. Tracking performance across each of these services in the application stack makes it easier to pinpoint the specific components that are impacting performance. It also makes it possible for frontend and backend engineers to have a shared dataset when troubleshooting user-impacting issues, which leads to more efficient root cause analysis.
How WordPress VIP can assist
WordPress VIP provides several tools to manage application performance, including integrated access to New Relic. When you enable New Relic performance monitoring tools using WordPress VIP recommended configuration settings, both your engineering team and our support team get notified anytime a performance issue occurs, which reduces the time to resolution.
Additionally, the Insights & Metrics in the VIP Dashboard provide a view into performance, application health, and usage data. The WordPress VIP Query Monitor provides developer tools for debugging database queries, PHP errors, warnings, and notices.