Downtime is no longer acceptable. Nor are bugs and the damage they cause. It's definitely not OK to say 'Whoops, we were so popular, we crashed.' Indeed, your clients want all your functionality available all of the time.
They expect that no matter where they are in the world, 24/7. If something does go wrong, you had better proactively know it in order to fix it - hopefully before your customers notice. Mobile application management tools have become the lifesavers of CIOs, CTOs, app owners and code monkeys everywhere. Not only does this business software allow you to gather data on long-term and short-term site usage and to flag issues, but it enables you to have a life (outside of work), and to detect and diagnose applications performance problems from anywhere.
We live in a world that not only expects but depends on reliability. So let's explore the decision-making process involved in finding the best mobile application performance management tool for your apps', your customers' and your team's needs.
Look for reliability engineering in both your app and in your APM
As its name suggests, reliability engineering prioritizes dependability within the lifecycle of a product, never going down under the agreed-upon time period (which, let's be serious, nowadays is assumed as for always and forever.) Well, the same as your clients expect that from you, you should expect that from your application performance management tool. While this is a newer SaaS marketplace in the grand scheme of since beginning of time (or even Information Age), you want an established APM app that has been around at least for a couple years. CopperEgg has been around for five years, while New Relic and LogicMonitor are almost seven years old. Age does matter, as you don't want to switch to an unproven software.
But that doesn't mean you can't have beauty too. even more than checking dates of release, you need to scour independent APM users reviews of the good, the bad and the ugly of application performance management tools.
Find the best mobile application performance management tool to hunt for bugs
If, for right now, you don't need to worry about the load on your server, database, website or app, but just need to make sure that it's running smoothly, you probably would do well to just have an APM focused on rapidly identifying bugs and glitches. LogicMonitor is for IT professionals working in the Network Management, Data Center Networking, Virtualization, Storage, MSP Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Cloud Services Provider (CSP) spaces. LogicMonitor is so you can monitor thousands of devices at the same time, so you can offer a full guarantee of service.
Find the best mobile application performance management tool to check your stress load
There are certain times a day, a year or random evenings coinciding with random football matches that will put pressure on your server. Using the right APM app means that you not only know when you have loads bearing down on your server, allowing you to outrun the risk of it crashing, but also this tool can automatically generate patterns and visual timelines, so you can prepare in advance for peak usage.
CopperEgg takes care of your server monitoring, Amazon Cloud monitoring, database monitoring, and website and application monitoring. You can customize your monitoring with smart alerts based on custom performance threshold alerts.
What makes CopperEgg a good mobile APM is because you can receive redundant alerts anywhere you want to, including SMS, email, Twitter DM, and many more ways that you choose to be a nuisance to you and your team when something goes wrong.
CopperEgg maintains a unique pricing model of on-demand usage, and this app is built to grow and scale with your company.
Find a an APM that works with your other tools
Sometimes you just need a bug-spotter, while others you need a server monitor, while sometimes you need both. You can either look for the somewhat rare tool that has everything, or pick and choose from a series of small APM apps that talk to each other via API or open source.
New Relic is the market leader and part of a suite of Software Analytics built for you to make sense of literally billions of pieces of data across multiple applications. This means that New Relic is a sort of all-in-one dream which includes separate products for:
- APM
- native mobile APM
- Real-time, big data analytics
- Server monitoring for both cloud & data centers
- Browser, front-end monitoring
- native iOS and Android apps
One of the cool tricks this app has up its sleeve is its APM transaction trace feature, which not only identifies the problem-causing bit, but it troubleshoots the root cause and captures the invocation partners related to the invocation.
All while boasting a platform with plug-in architecture for the technology partners and apps you need to work together for you, letting you install and build plugins specifically to your environment, providing support for applications written in Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, .NET and Node.js and related frameworks.
But maybe you aren't looking for an overarching APM platform to cover all of your needs. Maybe you just need simply a monitoring app that talks to the tools you want to use.
Datadog monitoring service for IT has more than 70 turn-key integrations for data aggregation, including Amazon Web Services, Elasticsearch, Github, Hadoop, Java, Nodejs, and Pingdom. You can customize your newsfeed to show source code commit from Github, system alerts from MySQL, and user alerts from Pingdom.
Of course, just released was the The Google Cloud Monitoring API to help you manage and monitor the Google Cloud Platform services you are already using. According to Programmable Web, the Cloud Monitoring API lets you to read monitoring data like response times, uptime, disk usage, MySQL queries and more for your Google Cloud Platform projects. Plus, of course, it already seamlessly works with all the Google Apps you have grown accustomed to already.
Don't just settle, try them all!
"So easy that no developer is needed," said one of our team's developers, even he hoping that it's easy to deploy, query and report. Just as you can't have downtime on your website or app, you really can't have downtime in your application monitoring; whether you are starting fresh or making a change from one app to another, you need an app that is simple enough to allow you to onboard your team and transfer your data all within a matter of days, if not hours.
That's why you need to take advantage of the free trials out there so you can find the right mobile application performance management tool for you.
Want more in-depth information before you give one of these APM a go?
Read independent product analyses for these application performance management apps:
