Looking for Application Performance Management (APM) tools for your organization? Here’s a list of the 10 best application performance management tools or APM tools today.
What’s APM and How to select the Best APM Tool?
APM or Application performance management allows organizations to monitor and track a variety of performance metrics for their applications in real-time.
Essentially, what you get with an Application performance management tool is a user’s performance view of your application. This helps understand how your application works when it’s run outside of the safe development environment.
How to select the best application performance management tool?
Check out the quick list of things that you must consider when selecting the best APM tool for your business.
- Language support
- Data reliability
- Reporting structure
- Security
- User-friendliness
- Pricing
List of the Best Application Performance Management Tools
Before we begin, here’s a quick summary of the best application performance management tools (APM tools)
- Oracle Enterprise Manager
- Metricly
- New Relic
- Solarwinds AppOptics
- Datadog APM
- ManageEngine Applications Manager
- AppDynamics
- Stackify Retrace
- Dynatrace
- Microsoft Azure Monitor
- Lightstep
Let’s get right into the list of the best application performance management tools available on the market in 2020.
One of the oldest software players in the world, Oracle, has an on-premise application performance management platform called the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. If you want to go with something that’s just built upon a high-level of software experience, Oracle would be a good bet.
Features:
- Database as a Service
- Enterprise monitoring
- Packaged application management
- Real Application testing
- Real User Experience Insight
- Installation and upgrades
Official Website: https://www.oracle.com/enterprise-manager/
A beautiful UI combined with the power of tracking the performance of cloud infrastructure and web applications, Metricly allows you to save costs on your AWS instances by tracking resources accurately.
Features:
- Total Costs Dashboard
- Fine Tune Auto-Scaling-Groups
- Identify idle resources
- EC2 optimization recommendations
- Complete breakdown of AWS costs
Official Website: https://www.metricly.com/
The New Relic APM offers a grouped view for the diagnosis of domain-level issues which allows you to narrow down the searches and metrics by throughput, response time, and data transfer size.
Features:
- Thread profiling
- Cross application testing
- Transaction breakdown and identification of most time-consuming transactions
- Database Monitoring
- Availability monitoring and advanced alerts
- Custom reporting
Official Website: https://newrelic.com/products/application-monitoring/
Created by Solarwinds, AppOptics is a SaaS-based APM tool for cloud-native environments with support for hybrid environments.
Features:
- Identify root-cause for performance issues
- Monitor application performance
- Full-stack visibility
- Monitor modern infrastructure
- AWS and Azure monitoring
Official Website: https://www.solarwinds.com/appoptics
Deep analysis for application performance management that allows collection, searching, and analyzing of distributed architectures. Datadog also allows for root-cause analysis to help teams release products more frequently with better and advanced features.
Features:
- Drill down from global to single customer
- Monitor cloud instances, containers, hybrid architectures and more in a single place
- Auto-map data flows and dependencies in real time
- Identify error and latency outliers using machine learning to ease your job
- Advanced alerts
- Support for web frameworks like Laravel, ASP.NET MVC, Django, Ruby on Rails, Gin, and Spring
Official Website: https://www.datadoghq.com/apm/
ManageEngine’s Applications Manager tool is a server and application performance management software that provides a single console for all types of application performance monitoring.
ManageEngine supports a variety of technologies including servers, virtual machines, cloud applications, databases, application servers, web servers, big data stores, web services, middleware and messaging components, and ERP software.
Features:
- Ready support for JDBC databases, NoSQL technologies, Big Data and In-memory databases.
- Track code-level response times for your applications
- Designed to run on your production servers so you have complete control
- Supports all major web servers
Official Website: https://www.manageengine.com/products/applications_manager/
If you’ve been in the SaaS space for even a little while, it’s hard not to come across this brand. AppDynamics is an APM that monitors every tiny movement that takes place on your deployed application including taps, swipes, and clicks to the user level.
Features:
- Offers high visibility even in complex, multi-cloud environments
- Machine learning automatically detects anomalies in performance and reduces MTTR
- Deployment flexibility between SaaS and on-premise
Official Website: https://www.appdynamics.com/
This is one of the more modern application performance management tools available on the market built with developers in mind. It also allows for bug tracing during development and QA.
Features:
- Supports .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, Ruby & Python applications
- Centralized logging
- Code Profiling
- Real user monitoring
- Identify slow dependencies, SQL queries, web requests, and transactions
- Monitor exception rates
Official Website: https://stackify.com/retrace/
With proprietary AI, Dynatrace offers one of the first self-learning application performance management experiences. Their entire platform focuses on automation featuring zero-touch configuration and automated relationship mapping.
Features:
- Automatically detect microservers running on independent containers
- Auto-capture timing and code-level context for transactions across all tiers
- Broad language support and platform support
- Tracks every build moving through the delivery pipeline
- Created for cloud-native and hybrid environments
Official Website: https://www.dynatrace.com/platform/application-performance-management/
10. Microsoft Azure Monitor
Microsoft’s Azure Monitor is highly integrated with their Azure platform to provide application and code-level insights for development, deployment and usability tracking across the spectrum.
Even though by the name this APM tool seem specific to Azure, it is equally useful for on-premise technology.
Features:
- Integrates with existing DevOps, IT service management, security and event management tools.
- Track live metrics streams, requests and response times, and events.
- Analyze and optimize virtual machines, Azure Kubernetes, Azure storage, and database performance
- Network monitoring for packet capture, routing issues, and more.
Official Website: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/monitor
Lightstep gives you instant insights through their correlation engine that finds the cause for every effect, even across service boundaries. You have unlimited data, hosts, and cardinality so you can get the level of detail you want without breaking the bank.
With their auto-instrumentation the installation process is so simple you can go from installation to insights in a matter of minutes with no code changes required.
Features:
- Unlimited tracing
- Unlimited cardinality
- Access to runtime metrics and logs
- Automated root cause analysis
- Automated real-time deployment analysis
- System-wide service diagrams
- Intra-service operations diagrams
- Alerting
- Integrations: PagerDuy, Slack, Istio, and many more
Official Website: https://lightstep.com/
And finally…
The choice for the best application performance management tool depends completely on what your needs are which APM tool suits your organization. The features that each of the tools possesses is way beyond the scope of this article since this is just a starting point for you to begin your research.
Out of all the APM tools that I reviewed, these 10 ended up showing up as the best application performance management tools based on the features offered and their user experience.
So if you like the features of any of these tools, make sure you browse through their official websites (links given for each tool) and understand which one suits your business the best.