As cloud computing proliferates enterprise IT, IT teams are under severe pressure to ensure serviceability in a complex hybrid environment. Therefore, SysOps, DevOps and SRE teams are looking at modern application monitoring tools to gain observability in a diverse computing environment spanning multiple on-premises and cloud implementations.
Moreover, with organizations increasingly making the bulk of their application stack available to end-users, application availability and monitoring are more closely tied to customer experience than ever. A single point of failure in the application stack can lead to poor customer experience and consequent loss of revenue. As an application grows in complexity, so does the number of points of failure. Pinpointing the issue becomes an arduous task at a time when one of your critical business processes is in jeopardy.
What does an application monitoring tool do?
Application monitoring tools provide real-time visibility into the health of applications and help identify issues before they impact end users. These tools also help you track changes made to the codebase, understand how those changes impact performance, and quickly roll back changes that break the application.
In a nutshell, application monitoring tools are critical to ensure the availability and serviceability of modern applications. They provide visibility into the performance and health of an application, as well as offering a wealth of performance data that can be used to diagnose and resolve issues.
Application monitoring tools come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but most offer some combination of real-time monitoring, alerts, dashboards, reporting, and log analysis. Many also include features specifically designed for monitoring the performance of web-based applications, among other metrics.
6 features every application monitoring tool must have
The right application monitoring solution will be highly dependent on the specific needs of your organization, but there are six features every application monitoring tool must have.
1. Application health monitoring
Apprehension is inevitable when transitioning from staging to production. No matter how rigorous your testing process is, unforeseen issues can arise once real users start interacting with your application in diverse environments. While stringent quality control helps minimize risks, it can also extend the release cycle, making it harder to adapt quickly to market demands and stay competitive. Even with thorough testing, undiscovered bugs may only surface when the application is live, leading to performance issues, crashes, or unexpected behavior.
This is where application health monitoring becomes a crucial safeguard. A robust monitoring tool continuously tracks performance, detects anomalies, and identifies issues that even the most diligent quality assurance team might have missed. By catching problems early, you prevent user frustration and protect your brand’s reputation. Instead of waiting for users to report failures, monitoring ensures you can proactively address issues, delivering a stable and reliable application from day one.
2. Flexible deployment
Application monitoring is crucial for ensuring that applications meet service level agreements (SLAs) and deliver a seamless user experience. However, the tool you use to monitor application health must be just as adaptable as the applications it oversees. Different organizations have unique infrastructure needs, compliance requirements, and security policies, which influence their choice of deployment models.
For example, some businesses handling sensitive internal data may prefer an on-premises implementation to maintain full control over security and compliance. Others may opt for a cloud-based SaaS solution for its scalability, ease of maintenance, and lower upfront costs. Meanwhile, organizations operating in regulated industries or those with hybrid IT environments may require a hybrid deployment model that balances the benefits of both worlds.
A robust application monitoring solution should support all these scenarios, offering SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid options. This flexibility ensures that businesses can integrate monitoring seamlessly into their existing infrastructure while maintaining compliance and operational efficiency.
3. Real-time error detection
Once your application is in production, performance degradation and unexpected crashes can quickly spiral into major issues, frustrating users and overwhelming your support team. In these critical moments, historic data and past insights provide limited help—you need real-time visibility into errors, failures, and anomalies as they occur. The ability to detect and respond to issues immediately can mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a full-blown outage.
A powerful application monitoring tool should offer real-time error tracking, capturing crash dumps, performance bottlenecks, and unexpected failures the moment they arise. An interactive error database allows you to filter errors by environment, version, or error type, helping you quickly identify the root cause and assess the severity of the issue. This level of granularity ensures faster decision-making, whether that means rolling back a faulty update, implementing a temporary fix, or pushing an urgent patch to restore stability. With real-time error detection, you can proactively manage application health, minimize downtime, and maintain user trust.
4. Smart alerting
Effective alerting is a cornerstone of application monitoring, enabling teams to identify and resolve issues before they affect end users. Without a well-structured alerting system, critical problems can go unnoticed until they escalate, leading to performance degradation, downtime, or user dissatisfaction. A robust monitoring solution should not only detect anomalies but also ensure that the right people are notified at the right time with actionable information.
Application monitoring tools are used by various teams—developers, testers, support staff, and business stakeholders—each with distinct responsibilities and priorities. A one-size-fits-all alerting system can create unnecessary noise, leading to alert fatigue or, worse, ignored warnings. Instead, the system should provide configurable, role-based notifications. For instance, developers and testers need alerts related to code errors or framework version conflicts, while the support team should receive notifications about service disruptions, API failures, or customer-impacting issues. By ensuring each team receives relevant, actionable alerts, smart alerting streamlines issue resolution, reduces response time, and enhances overall system reliability.
5. Detailed insights and stats
The effectiveness of an application monitoring tool is largely determined by the depth and clarity of the insights it provides. When an application encounters a runtime exception, the monitoring tool should capture and log relevant details, ensuring that issues can be quickly identified and diagnosed. A well-structured logging system should make it easy to pinpoint critical errors amidst large volumes of log data, highlighting stack traces, system information, and any relevant custom values that aid troubleshooting.
Beyond raw logs, a powerful monitoring solution should offer the ability to group and filter logs based on key parameters. For example, tools like LogMill allow logs to be categorized by application version, making it easier to track issues across different releases. While logs provide in-depth event details, sometimes a high-level overview is more useful—such as crash reporting data spanning a specific downtime period. A good monitoring tool should offer visual representations of grouped logs, enabling teams to quickly analyze trends, spot recurring errors, and isolate problems by criteria like error codes or cloud test environments. This combination of granular insights and big-picture analytics ensures that teams can efficiently monitor application health, troubleshoot issues, and optimize performance.
6. Enterprise-grade IAM
Security and access control are critical aspects of application monitoring, especially in enterprise environments where sensitive data is involved. Modern application monitoring tools incorporate Identity and Access Management (IAM) features to ensure that only authorized users can access specific logs, metrics, and system data. This level of control is particularly important when dealing with applications that handle confidential or regulated information, such as financial services, healthcare, or enterprise SaaS platforms.
For instance, if you’re deploying a banking application, you wouldn’t want unrestricted access to production logs, as they might contain sensitive customer data. Instead, access should be limited to key personnel, such as security teams, senior developers, or compliance officers. However, during the staging and testing phases, broader access might be necessary for debugging and performance analysis. A robust IAM system should provide role-based access control (RBAC), allowing organizations to define permissions based on roles, departments, or project stages. This ensures compliance with data protection regulations while enabling efficient troubleshooting and system monitoring across different environments.
Application monitoring with LogMill
LogMill is a service that captures any errors or logs from your app to help you make it healthy. It removes the apprehension of taking an application live with production-level performance, which means no more worries about being down for users. LogMill will even tell which services in the applications need some attention.
LogMill is the perfect tool for any project with a team of people working from different locations. The application monitoring app allows you to control who has access and when they can use it, while also allowing collaboration at every level imaginable - whether that be within one department or across multiple departments.
Say goodbye to notifications and alerts flooding over inboxes with its built-in SMTP functionality, as it comes preinstalled.
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