Recent studies have shown that customer/user experience is the real differentiator when it comes to gaining a competitive edge in business. Part of improving your customer experience strategy is embracing an application-driven business approach. It’s important for businesses to ensure the highest degree of application performance, usability, and availability.

To ensure optimal customer interactions with your applications, you need an application performance monitoring (APM) solution that can offer deep insights into your application users and also manage the complexities of application performance. If your team is planning to invest in an APM solution, you should consider these five steps before making a purchasing decision.

Look for Deep Application Performance Analytics

Modern APM is not just about ensuring that business-critical applications are up and running. Your APM solution needs to focus on the app’s ability to meet the needs of the end user as well as ensuring optimal performance. This cannot be done without having the capability to get deeper insights into how your application is performing.

You need a solution that helps you understand how to fix vulnerabilities that are affecting user experience, how to troubleshoot an ASP.NET crash, how to improve application load time and other complex performance issues. The right APM solutions should offer breadth of visibility to better understand user interactions with your application as well as how you can improve end-user experience.

Rapid Root-Cause Analysis Support

Does the APM solution come with the ability to filter our critical data from the data you don’t need to quickly pinpoint problems and emerging application performance issues? To ensure a more effective end-user experience, you need to choose an APM solution that comes with intelligent alerting that allows IT and developers to focus on what’s important.

Understanding the root cause analysis of performance issues is key to optimizing the customer experience. You need a solution that provides the ability to monitor application performance and multiple transactions across the entire application environment.

Deep Change Analytics Support

In a fast-changing digital world, applications are not to be left behind as users and customers look for better performance and uninterrupted availability. You need an APM solution that can quickly provide insights into deep change analytics. What has changed in your application? Can the APM platform make collaboration between IT and development teams easier?

Does the APM solution offer changed analytics features that enable you to click on any event and understand what changed, when and how? This capability helps accelerate problem-solving time and improve application availability. You should be able to get virtualization of the order of application changes so you can better understand the impact of the issues and how to fix them.

Support Across the Entire Application Environment

Innovative APM solutions should support all your business applications across the entire application environment, from mobile to desktop browsers and even the distributed environment. You need a solution that offers complete end-to-end transaction performance monitoring from mobile to mainframe, including browser and cloud.

apm solution

Support should also include microservices and APIs, the ability to monitor the application’s security environment as well as legacy application servers and third-party solutions.  What you need is a complete solution that can help you identify performance issues and outages and fix them before they have an impact on the user experience.

Scalability at All Levels

In today’s world of high-speed application development, developers are facing increasing pressure to have applications out on the market as soon as possible. This has caused development teams to overlook certain critical issues. Scalability is one of those issues.

Businesses must invest in APM solutions that are highly scalable to ensure they can meet the needs of a growing distributed enterprise. Performance scalability and streamlined collaboration are key aspects that must be considered to ensure smooth application performance. There is no doubt that choosing the right APM solution benefits organization in many ways.