Top 23 Best Application Performance Monitoring Tools 2024

Introduction to Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) tools are vital for modern software teams to monitor and optimize their applications and systems. As applications grow larger and more complex, APM solutions provide visibility into performance, availability, errors, and resource usage. This allows developers to pinpoint problems quickly and maintain optimal end user experiences.

Why Application Performance Monitoring Matters

APM tools have become indispensable in today’s software landscape. Key reasons why include:

Improve Customer Experience: Catching performance issues and errors rapidly improves user satisfaction.
Optimize Efficiency: Understanding resource usage helps cost-optimize infrastructure.
Accelerate Delivery: Faster problem identification means faster fixes and less downtime.
Enhance Visibility: End to end visibility into complex, distributed systems is difficult without APM.

Top 23 Application Performance Monitoring Tools

Organizations have many choices when selecting APM software. Here are 23 top options to consider:

Best Application Performance Monitoring Tools

1. Datadog

Datadog is a full stack monitoring platform supporting metrics, tracing, logging, and more. Key features include:

Integration with hundreds of technologies
Dashboards for visualizing metrics
Alerting for performance anomalies
APM with distributed tracing
Log analysis and analytics

2. New Relic

New Relic focuses on observability into application performance. It provides:

Real user monitoring (RUM)
Robust APM tracing and metrics
Cross application maps and dashboards
Alerting and collaboration tools

3. Dynatrace

Dynatrace has an AI powered approach to application and infrastructure monitoring. Capabilities include:

Auto detected topology and mapping
Code level visibility
Smart alerts and instant root cause analysis
User experience and performance monitoring

4. AppDynamics

AppDynamics is an application intelligence platform owned by Cisco. It features:

Code level diagnostics with easy dynamic instrumentation
Business transaction tracing and analytics
Automated root cause analysis using ML
Flexible dashboards and custom reporting

5. Splunk

Splunk is a leader in analyzing machine data. For APM, it provides:

Real time operational intelligence insights
Infrastructure, logs, metrics, and traces analysis
Dashboards, alerts, reports, and more
Direct integration with hundreds of data sources

6. Elastic

The Elastic Stack delivers full lifecycle application management. Its APM solution has:

Distributed tracing for deep application analysis
Real user monitoring with client side instrumentation
Automatically generated topology maps
Fast and powerful search and analytics

7. Instana

Instana emphasizes automated application monitoring powered by AI. Key features:

Automatic APM instrumentation and baselining
Actionable alerts with context
Built-in infrastructure, logs, and website monitoring
Trace analytics using machine learning

8. SolarWinds

SolarWinds APM supports hybrid and multi cloud environments. It includes:

Distributed transaction tracing
Customizable dashboards
JVM and database monitoring
Kubernetes and container visibility
Predictive alerting algorithms

9. Micro Focus

The Micro Focus APM platform offers robust enterprise application monitoring. It has:

Business transaction tracing and deep diagnostics
Flexible custom dashboards
Calculated metrics and attribute analysis
Global data search across all components

10. Microsoft Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is Microsoft’s native APM offering. It provides:

Auto instrumentation of Azure workloads
Map based transaction diagnostics
Integration across Azure services
Query capabilities via Azure Data Explorer

11. CloudWatch by Amazon Web Services (AWS)

CloudWatch delivers observability of AWS workloads and metrics. It features:

Dashboards, events, metrics, and logs
Alarms for anomalies and incidents
X-Ray distributed tracing
Lambda monitoring and Container Insights

12. Oracle Cloud Observability and Management

Oracle’s APM combines monitoring with log analytics including:

Unified cross tier transaction tracing
Custom dashboards and topological maps
Anomaly detection powered by machine learning
Built-in metrics monitoring

13. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor supports performance monitoring across hybrid environments. It has:

Automated discovery of infrastructure
Customizable dashboards and reporting
Threshold based alerts and anomaly detection
Support for matrices, logs, and tracing data

14. Nagios

Nagios focuses primarily on infrastructure monitoring but also supports APM via plugins. Key capabilities:

Monitoring automation for metrics and events
Visualization via third party tools
Extensive customization options

15. Zabbix

Zabbix provides open source infrastructure and application monitoring. It includes:

Custom dashboards and notifications
Automatic discovery of apps, servers, and devices
Monitoring of logs, metrics, network, and cloud
Wide range of monitoring plugins

16. Paessler PRTG

Paessler PRTG delivers unified monitoring and APM covering:

Sensor based data collection
Interactive maps
Customizable dashboards and reports
Alerting based on thresholds

17. Site24x7

Site24x7 offers cloud based performance monitoring including:

Website, server, and application monitoring
Transaction tracing and network path analysis
Custom reporting and notifications
Integration with various ITSM tools

18. BMC Helix

BMC Helix supports observability across public clouds. It provides:

Auto instrumentation and discovery
Operations logs, metrics, and traces analysis
Incident management and IT workflow integrations
Customizable dashboards and topology visualizations

19. Broadcom DX APM

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management delivers:

Code level diagnostics with PurePath analysis
User defined transaction tracing and SmartAgents
Flexible rule builder for metrics, topology, and alerts
Integration with third party analytics solutions

20. Riverbed AppInternals

Riverbed focuses on network performance. Its APM solution offers:

Transaction diagrams with tier specific tracing
Database monitoring
Web server analytics
Custom dashboards and role based views

21. Catchpoint

Catchpoint monitors end user digital experiences including:

Real user monitoring from 350+ global vantage points
Waterfall diagrams to analyze impact
Alerts for availability, speed, errors
Integration with notification tools

22. AppNeta

AppNeta’s SaaS based offering specializes in network performance monitoring and APM. Key features:

Network flow monitoring and diagnostics
Transaction waterfalls to isolate delays
Application dependency mapping
Custom analytics with filtering

23. NGINX Amplify

NGINX Amplify complements the NGINX server. It provides:

Granular visibility into NGINX performance
Easy deployment within NGINX ecosystem
Infrastructure overview and application analytics
Alerts based on usage thresholds

Conclusion

There are many excellent APM tools available today delivering capabilities like tracing, metrics, logging, alerting, and more. When selecting solutions, consider factors like supported languages and integrations, analysis depth, ease of implementation, scalability needs, and costs. Leading commercial, open source, SaaS and cloud-based options all exist. And many vendors offer free trials to test drive different products. Overall, APM is essential for modern DevOps teams to deliver exceptional application experiences even as complexity continues growing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key capabilities of APM solutions?

Core capabilities typically include transaction tracing, metrics collection, logging, alerting, visual dashboards, topology mapping, and more. Advanced features like AI powered analytics are also gaining popularity.

What types of data do APM tools collect?

APM solutions gather performance telemetry like application response times, throughput, errors, infrastructure metrics, logs, network data, code level traces, business transactions, user sessions, and more.

How much do APM tools cost?

Pricing models include free open source tools, commercial licenses based on features/data volumes, and SaaS based subscriptions often charging per host/container. Enterprise wide deployments can cost over $100K annually.

What applications can APM solutions monitor?

Most APM platforms support monitoring popular languages (Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Go, etc.) either auto detected or via language agents. Mainframe, cloud, mobile, web, messaging, database, and custom apps are also generally supported.

How difficult is it to implement APM tools?

Ease of implementation varies. SaaS based or auto instrumenting tools are simplest. Some solutions require manual instrumentation or agents installed per technology/host to enable deeper monitoring.

Author
Recent Posts

MK Usmaan

Mk Usmaan is an avid AI enthusiast who studies and writes about the latest developments in artificial intelligence. As an aspiring computer scientist, he is fascinated by neural networks, machine learning, and how AI technology is rapidly evolving.