Application Performance Monitoring
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a set of tools and practices used to track and analyze the performance, availability, and user experience of software applications in real-time. It collects metrics like response times, error rates, and resource usage to identify bottlenecks, diagnose issues, and ensure optimal application health. APM solutions typically include features such as transaction tracing, code-level diagnostics, and infrastructure monitoring.
Developers should use APM when building or maintaining production applications, especially in microservices or distributed architectures, to proactively detect performance degradation, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents, and improve user satisfaction. It is critical for ensuring service-level agreements (SLAs), optimizing resource utilization, and debugging complex, multi-tier applications where traditional logging may be insufficient.