In today’s enterprise landscape, it’s critical for Development, QA, and Operations teams to be in sync.  From phone apps to internal apps, businesses must ensure that they’re always available and running smoothly. If not, users are likely to abandon your application or site, which could directly affect revenue.

A simple explanation of Application Performance Monitoring (also known as APM) is: the steps or procedures taken to make certain applications perform in a desired way.  A more formal definition comes from Gartner. They define application performance monitoring as multiple facets that tie together three main points:

  • Digital User/Experience Testing/Monitoring (DEM)
  • This is when an end user interacts with a particular application
  • Application (App) Discovery or Tracing with Diagnostics (known as ADTD)
  • Mapping transactions across multiple servers to find and remedy problems
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) for IT-related operations (AIOps) for applications
  • Using big data and AI to resolve IT related problems

Application Monitoring Tools – A Complete Comparison

Continually monitoring your systems allows you to manage the performance and availability of software applications, leading to quicker response times and satisfied customers. Especially digital end user experience is one of the main goals when dealing with real user interactions and business transactions.  Additional items to consider when choosing an APM solution:

  • Works with existing environment
  • Stress testing
  • Performance Insights
  • Simplified, functional GUI
  • Ability to record and monitor user activity
  • Global monitoring locations
  • Real-time reporting
  • Analyze trends
  • Set up customized alerts
  1. Dotcom-Monitor’s UserView Application Monitoring

UserView replicates the user’s activity with your website or application.  You can simulate specific actions (mouse clicks, page navigation, text inputs, etc.) using the EveryScript Scripting Tool, giving you the ability to validate and play back the steps, verifying that your pages and applications are performing to your standards.

UserView is supports HTML5, AJAX, Flex, Flash, Java, QuickTime, Ruby, Silverlight, Windows Media Player, and many more.

  • Test web application functionality
  • Run continuous tests
  • Global monitoring locations
  • Page load speed
  • Monitor website uptime
  • Mimic real user behavior/experience
  • Customizable alerts
  • Waterfall reports
  • Test using over 40+ desktop and mobile devices
  • Custom alerts

Cost:  From $77/month

 

  1. TrueSight APM

Consisting of three solutions – TrueSight app testing, TrueSight operations testing, and TrueSight capacity planning – TrueSight APM from BMC is a SaaS suite that helps test and monitor the end-user experience of your crucial apps.

  • Easy and quick deployment
  • Monitor applications during development
  • Mimic real user behavior
  • Get insights in real time
  • Pinpoint source of problems by mapping app topology

Pricing: Contact for more information

 

  1. ManageEngine Applications Manager

This tool provides enterprise-level monitoring, helping companies safeguard their mission-critical applications, regardless of the environment.

  • 100+ applications supported
  • Service Level Agreement manager
  • Deep-dive into IT assets
  • Issue identification
  • Access for multiple users

Cost:

  • Licenses (in a subscription model) start at $900 for twenty-five monitors with a single user (Professional) and $9,000 for two hundred and fifty monitors (Enterprise)
  • Perpetual licenses start at $2,000 for twenty-five monitors with one user (Professional) and $23,000 for two hundred and fifty monitors with one user (Enterprise)

 

  1. Microsoft System Center – Operations Manager

From deployment to monitoring, SCOM allows you to manage your infrastructure and critical applications.

  • User-friendly consoles and workflows
  • Manage both on-premises and cloud workloads
  • Deploy critical updates to multiple devices
  • Email notifications (internal or external)

Cost:

  • Starts at $3,607 (Datacenter Edition)
  • Starts at $1,323 (Standard Edition)

 

  1. Raygun APM

Raygun APM monitors the performance of your stack, providing you with real-time data and alerts when errors arise.

  • Visualize performance data
  • Crash reporting
  • View user activity
  • Fix bugs
  • Identify bottlenecks

Cost:  Platform:  $199/month

 

  1. JENNIFER

JENNIFER is an easy-to-learn tool that offers instant data in-depth transaction monitoring. The tool also includes web-based monitoring of various technologies such as HTML5. JENNIFER is also cloud-based for maximum flexibility.

  • Trace individual transactions
  • Instantaneous monitoring
  • Detailed network topology view
  • Cloud-based
  • Able to process big data

Pricing: Custom, must be contacted.

 

  1. CA APM

Designed to manage the complex IT environments of today, CA APM helps IT teams monitor, find, and remedy application issues before users are affected.

  • Analytics centric
  • Supports physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile environments
  • Transaction tracing
  • Easily deploy updates

Pricing: Inquire within.

 

  1. AutoPilot

AutoPilot gives IT teams a single point of insight into their applications and business environment, allowing issues to be remedied quickly.

Features

  • Support for various software applications
  • Reduce MTTR
  • Customizable rules
  • Automatic alerts
  • User-friendly GUI

Cost:  Contact for pricing

 

  1. AlertSite

Alertsite allows teams to monitor everything from websites to mobile apps, giving visibility into how applications are running.

  • Network of over 340 monitoring locations
  • Scalable
  • Intuitive, customizable dashboards
  • Custom reporting capabilities
  • Issue alerts

Cost:  Contact for pricing

 

  1. AppEnsure

AppEnsure can correspond user experience to specific applications, giving IT teams real-time information to quickly respond to any issues.

  • Real-time end-user experience
  • Auto mapping
  • In-depth diagnostics
  • Setup alarms for abnormal performance issues

Cost: 

  • $5/mo for each CCU and $1/month for Citrix
  • SA – $10 to $50 per month
  • Enpoints $1-$5/month
  • A free trial option is available

 

  1. Foglight

Foglight from Quest easily incorporates into existing environments to help manage and remedy performance issues from any source.

  • Gain end-to-end view into your environment
  • Leverage real-time and historical data
  • Real-time email and alerts
  • Single GUI

Cost:  Contact for pricing

 

  1. New Relic APM

New Relic APM provides in-depth, real-time data visibility and analytics for full insight into their environment, wherever they happen to be running, allowing DevOps teams to quickly find issues and provide performance metrics for their applications.

  • Monitor applications
  • Diagnostic tools
  • Response Time, throughput, and error rates
  • Database metrics
  • Root-cause diagnosis
  • Error monitoring
  • Individual transaction tracing
  • SLA reports

Cost:  Dependent on size, number, and total time running of instances

 

  1. Stackify Retrace

Retrace is a robust software that give DevOps real-time analysis of the behavior of applications, helping improve customer service and application performance. The software identifies system bottlenecks so that problems can be resolved quickly, and users are unaffected.

  • Drill down into specific issues
  • App performance monitoring
  • Debugging
  • Centralized logging
  • App and server metrics

Cost:  $50/month per server (Additional add-ons available)

 

  1. Datadog APM

Datadog APM provides end-to-end insight into an application’s health and performance.  Offered as an upgrade to their Pro and Enterprise plans, Datadog APM integrates with many 3rd party platforms and uses intelligent learning to watch for application issues.

  • Drill down to analyze application performance
  • Trace end-to-end requests
  • Track app performance
  • Create alerts/notifications
  • Provides infrastructure data for analysis

Cost:  $31/month per host

 

  1. LogicMonitor Platfom

LogicMonitor is an automated, SaaS-based performance monitoring platform. Whether on premises, hybrid environment, or in the cloud, the platform provides complete visibility into your critical applications.

  • Full visibility into applications and cloud services
  • Easily-configurable dashboards
  • Network device configurations
  • Custom alerts and reports
  • Technical support

Cost:  Contact for pricing

 

  1. Dynatrace

Powered by AI, Dynatrace application monitoring provides all performance metrics in real-time and detects and diagnoses problems automatically, providing insight into every end-user transaction and application.

  • Full stack accessibility
  • Analysis and alerts powered by AI
  • Deployable in the cloud or physically
  • Performance monitoring
  • On-demand support
  • Scalable

Cost:  Varies

 

  1. Cisco AppDynamics APM

AppDynamics APM monitors enterprise application performance, discovering, mapping, and providing insight into the user journey, helping IT to identify and resolve application issues during the development and production phases.

  • Synthetic monitoring
  • Trend analysis
  • RUM (Browser/Mobile)
  • Performance and Database agents
  • Alerts

Cost:  Contact for pricing

 

  1. Bugsnag

Bugsnag helps businesses by automatically monitoring, collecting, and prioritizing application diagnostics, helping internal teams prioritize issues and giving insights to end-user usability.

  • Intuitive dashboard
  • Identify client-side errors
  • Automated error reporting
  • Web, mobile, and desktop versions

Cost:

  • Pro version: starting at $59/month
  • Team version: starting at $29/month
  • Contact for custom pricing

 

  1. nGeniusONE

nGeniusOne provides end-to-end performance analysis of a company’s applications and networks, helping IT organizations proactively identify and fix issues.

  • Data visualization
  • Packet-level analysis
  • At-a-glance metrics
  • Custom reporting and alerts

Cost:  Contact for pricing

 

  1. Instrumental Application Monitoring

Instrumental provides real-time monitoring and metric collection across an organizations’ infrastructure, helping DevOps teams to identify bottlenecks.

  • Automated system and service monitoring
  • Fast and easy application monitoring
  • Real-time visualization
  • Intelligent alerts
  • Full-stack metric collection

Cost: 

  • Production Plan: $0.10/metric per month
  • Enterprise Plan: Varies

Application Monitoring Tools: The Verdict

As you can see, there are a lot of great application performance monitoring tools on the market – more than what’s listed above. APM companies that offer a free trial can be a great way to evaluate your option to see what works for your environment.  The UserView 30-day trial is great in this regard. It allows you to try out the core monitoring features for free – monitoring performance from the end-user perspective, setting up custom alerts, and having access to online reports.