what is apm

APM stands for Application Performance Management or Application Performance Monitoring. It is the practice of monitoring and managing the performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service. Practitioners use APM to ensure system availability, optimize service performance and response times, and improve user experiences. Two sets of performance metrics are closely monitored in APM. The first set of performance metrics defines the performance experienced by end-users of the application. One example of performance is average response times under peak load. The components of the set include load and response times. Mobile apps, websites, and business applications are typical use cases for monitoring. However, with today’s highly connected digital world, monitoring use cases expand to the services, processes, hosts, logs, networks, and end-users that access these applications — including a company’s customers and employees. An effective APM tool should focus on infrastructure monitoring, as well as tracking the user experience, the performance and reliability of any dependencies and business transactions.