Application performance issues can affect user experience, customer retention, and business outcomes. Modern applications are complex, with multiple layers spanning front-end interfaces, back-end services, databases, and third-party integrations.
A robust APM checklist ensures you're monitoring every critical component, reducing blind spots, and minimizing the impact of performance issues on end users. This structured monitoring helps teams proactively detect issues, accelerate resolution times, and maintain consistently high service quality.
Whether you're working with monoliths, microservices, or hybrid cloud-native architectures, an APM tool with full-stack capabilities ensures complete coverage and insight. The following checklist outlines essential features to look for in an APM platform—features that are built into Site24x7's APM Insight to support end-to-end visibility and performance optimization.
1. Application discovery and transaction monitoring
An application ecosystem is distributed and expansive. A monitoring solution should automatically discover connected components, giving you real-time visibility into web transactions, background jobs, and external calls. Also, the solution must capture throughput, response time, error rates, and related metrics for each transaction to help identify slow transactions and outliers quickly. Site24x7 provides this and the flexibility to custom instrument the transactions. You can isolate critical, high-value business transactions that are critical to your application's continuity and get individualized insights and proactive alerts.
2. Distributed tracing and microservices visibility
With end-to-end distributed tracing, Site24x7 makes it easy to monitor microservices-based applications. You can view traces across services, follow parent-child span relationships, and correlate service-to-service calls across containers or hybrid deployments. Distributed tracing allows you to visualize transaction flow clearly and identify performance degradation within or across services.
3. Code-level diagnostics and thread profiling
The availability of code-level performance metrics analysis helps to drill down into classes, methods, and functions to identify the cause of execution delays. The Site24x7 APM tool can analyze thread dumps in real time, inspect thread states, and identify issues like blocking calls, deadlocks, and excessive garbage collection. This granular-level insight helps optimize application performance at the source code level.
4. Database performance monitoring
Database issues often manifest as slow application performance. Tracking the performance of SQL and NoSQL databases by monitoring response times, slow queries, and connection counts. Site24x7 APM Insight helps you identify database query bottlenecks and correlate database latency with application slowness to resolve performance degradation quickly.
5. Error tracking and exception monitoring
An application monitoring tool must be able to capture the full stack traces of unhandled exceptions. This enables SREs to perform detailed error trend analyses based on type, frequency, and affected transactions. With Site24x7's APM tool, you can configure thresholds to be alerted of any deviations from the normal performing baselines.
6. Application and infrastructure correlation
Site24x7 correlates application metrics with infrastructure data for faster root cause analysis. You can view APM traces alongside CPU, memory, disk, and process data from the server layer, as well as container and Kubernetes metrics. The platform also integrates with AWS, Azure, and GCP services, providing unified observability across your cloud infrastructure and application stack.
7. AI-powered alerts and anomaly detection
Stay ahead of issues with dynamic thresholds powered by AI-powered anomaly detection. Site24x7 automatically baselines performance patterns and identifies deviations using dynamic thresholds. Depending on your choice of medium, you receive alerts through email, SMS, push notifications, or integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and PagerDuty. Moreover, RCA is accelerated with automatic dependency mapping and event correlation across layers.
8. Custom dashboards and advanced reporting
Site24x7 allows you to create custom dashboards using drag-and-drop widgets to visualize key application metrics the way you want. You can schedule automated reports for transaction performance, uptime, SLA adherence, and resource usage, and export them in PDF or CSV formats. Access controls ensure that the right teams see the right data at the right time.
9. Extensive platform support
An application ecosystem is never singular or monolithic. Therefore, an APM tool should support a variety of platforms to ensure full-stack visibility and monitoring support across web and mobile environments. Site24x7 APM Insight supports a wide range of platforms, including Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, and Python, enabling developers to monitor applications across diverse technology stacks. It also offers mobile application monitoring for Android, iOS, React Native, and Flutter applications, helping teams track crashes, performance, and user interactions in real time. Site24x7 also supports OpenTelemetry framework, making it observability diverse and robust.
10. Extend APM monitoring with smart integrations
While an APM tool monitors what happens under the hood of the application, a powerful RUM tool can help you understand your application's user interaction patterns and front-end issues in real time. Site24x7 offers a powerful RUM tool that can track page load metrics, DOM processing time, SPA performance, and many more browser monitoring metrics. Site24x7 also offers integrated log management, which automatically correlates performance traces to aid in faster debugging.
Make your applications resilient with Site24x7 APM
The APM checklist acts as a technical guide to ensure that you have all the relevant features, to provide complete visibility, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and deliver consistent digital experiences. Built with robust features to monitor, analyze, and improve application performance across every layer, Site24x7's APM Insight has all of the above and many more.
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1. Why do I need an APM tool if I already have log monitoring?
While logs provide details on specific events and errors, an APM tool gives you a holistic view of application performance, including response times, transaction traces, and dependencies. APM helps you proactively identify slow performance before errors occur, whereas logs are typically used for reactive debugging.
2. What are the top 3 features to look for in an APM tool?
The top three features are: Distributed Tracing (for microservices visibility), Code-Level Diagnostics (to find the exact line of code causing delays), and Real User Monitoring (RUM) (to understand the actual end-user experience).
3. How important is Distributed Tracing?
Critical, especially for modern microservices architectures. Distributed Tracing allows you to track a single request as it travels across multiple services, containers, and databases, helping you identify exactly which component is causing latency.
4. Can one APM tool monitor hybrid environments?
Yes, robust APM tools like Site24x7 are designed to monitor applications running on-premises, in private clouds, and across public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) simultaneously, providing a unified dashboard for hybrid environments.
5. Does Site24x7 support all these checklist items?
Yes, Site24x7 APM Insight covers all 10 items in this checklist, including application dependency mapping, distributed tracing, code-level diagnostics, AI-powered alerts, and extensive platform support.