Application Performance Monitoring vs Infrastructure Monitoring

Developers should use APM tools when building or maintaining applications that require high reliability, scalability, or user satisfaction, such as e-commerce platforms, SaaS products, or microservices architectures meets developers should learn infrastructure monitoring to build resilient, scalable applications and participate in devops/sre practices. Here's our take.

Application Performance Monitoring

Nice Pick

Developers should use APM tools when building or maintaining applications that require high reliability, scalability, or user satisfaction, such as e-commerce platforms, SaaS products, or microservices architectures

Pros

• They are essential for proactively detecting performance degradation, troubleshooting production incidents, and optimizing resource utilization to reduce downtime and improve user experience
• Related to: observability, distributed-tracing

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Infrastructure Monitoring

Developers should learn infrastructure monitoring to build resilient, scalable applications and participate in DevOps/SRE practices

Pros

• It's essential for troubleshooting production issues, capacity planning, and ensuring high availability in microservices or cloud-native architectures
• Related to: observability, apm-application-performance-monitoring

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Application Performance Monitoring is a tool while Infrastructure Monitoring is a concept. We picked Application Performance Monitoring based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Application Performance Monitoring wins

Based on overall popularity. Application Performance Monitoring is more widely used, but Infrastructure Monitoring excels in its own space.