Applications outages, especially when they affect your critical applications, can render your business processes catatonic. If you’re a managed service provider (MSP), any disruption to your client’s business applications may come at the expense of your reputation. In addition to losing credibility in the marketplace, you may as well be liable to pay penalties according to the terms of the binding SLA.

Modern business applications have too many functional parts, which increases their surface area to fault tolerance. An average enterprise IT solution contains no less than 50 independent parts which target different aspects of the business process. Monitoring applications at this scale is beyond the scope of a small team of quality analysts or SysOps admins. It requires a large team monitoring the application’s health 24/7 and raising tickets to the relevant teams in case of a drop. As a result, enterprise IT is increasing its reliance on modern application monitoring tools such as LogMill.

Why use an application monitoring tool?

There can be many reasons why an organization may need an automated application monitoring tool:

Preventive Maintenance

Without an application monitoring tool, you’re planning blind when it comes to your business and customer-centric applications. While a poorly written application may break without as much a warning, this may not be the case with every piece of software in your application stack. A severe drop of performance in your ticketing system may be connected to the failing VM, or even a fault in the bare metal itself. Without an application performance monitoring tool, there is no way of knowing this before the failure happens.

With an APM tool, you will know well in advance which submodules are in need of attention. In case a potential problem is detected, it will give you enough time to run diagnostics, find the source and fix it before things become worse. Preventive maintenance is the primary reason brands insist on using an application monitoring tools.

Reputation Management

Without an application monitoring tool, there is a fair chance that a subset of users will encounter the issue with an application before you do. This will put you in an awkward situation and will raise suspicion about your ability to manage your services. Users may share their negative experiences in public forums, which could lead to unwanted scrutiny from technical journals and software review websites.

Business Forecasts

Application monitoring tools give you a fair idea of how your application is performing under the current infrastructure load and whether you should add more hardware resources or not. This forecast will save you the potential cost of sudden hardware upgrades and will give you enough time to gradually make hardware upgrades to your application release cycles.

Improve TAT

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) is crucial to your customers, especially when they are a part of the SLA terms. Without an application monitoring system and supporting logs, it is hard to define a doable turnaround time. For large application systems, it is hard to pin the problem to a single point of failure when the application is complex, and many things can go wrong at once. An application monitoring system will make it easier to get the application up and running as quickly as possible by helping you get to the bottom of the situation faster — something the customer expects out of MTTR.

Real-Time Reporting

While historic data on your application’s performance is vital to make important business and infrastructure decisions, sometimes you want to monitor a flagged application in real time. This is where real time data is of great value. With real-time reporting built into your application monitoring tool, you get valuable insight into a freshly deployed build before moving it to the production. Real-time reporting is also crucial to detecting failures in the shortest time possible and fixing them before the majority of customers notice.

Synthetic Performance Monitoring

If the monitoring tool shares the same resources as your application, it may malfunction in the case of an overload or failure to the underlying infrastructure. A synthetic monitoring tool has a dedicated resource pool that communicates with the application modules and the infrastructure via open API to report metrics and return logs. Even if the application fails, the monitoring system will keep running returning metrics on the other running apps in the VM or the infrastructure.

Choosing the right application monitoring tool

With so many application monitoring tools to choose from, making the right decision comes down to your expectations. What you expect from the tool will remove much of the noise from your decision. Let’s see what matters and what doesn’t.

Technologies

Which technologies are critical to the architecture of your software stack? The application monitoring tool must support the technology, whether it’s a programming language, development framework, or runtime environment. So if you’re a full stack development company, it is essential that the tool supports monitoring NodeJS.

SaaS or not

SaaS is the go-to method for software distribution when it comes to application monitoring software, but it may or may not go well with your application architecture. Look for a vendor that offers both subscription and licensing models.

Ease-of-use

The monitoring solution you paid for must start delivering value from day one. If it doesn’t, you made a bad purchase decision. Here are some of the aspects of an easy-to-use monitoring solution:

• Deploy - It should be easy to deploy with minimum dependencies and installation configurations.
• Use - It should be intuitive and customizable to suit the needs of various teams that are going to use it.
• Maintain - The vendor should be responsible for issuing patches and upgrades and fixing it if it breaks. An SLA that puts responsibility on your side is a bad deal to begin with.

Reporting and Analytics

Write down a list of KPIs that you want to measure with the help of the application monitoring tool and compare it with the feature set of the tools you have shortlisted. You might want code-level diagnostics at various tiers, but one tool is focused on putting analytics on your performance metrics. That tool might still converge code-level diagnostics, but also flood your inbox with too many reports as soon as you turn on email-based notifications.

Security

A monitoring system collects crucial data about your business systems. What if an intruder could gain access to the database and extort money from you under the pretext of selling the data to your competitor? Security is as crucial to a business application as it is to an external system monitoring it. Make sure the vendor of the tool cares about security as much as you do.

Pricing

The pricing is subjective, but you should not be paying a premium for the features you’re not going to use. The price-to-feature ratio should only account for the features you’re going to use. If the monitoring tool monitors various VM parameters and your application is deployed in a container, those features don’t matter to you, and you shouldn’t be paying extra for those.

Support

A 24/7 support center is a good starting point when TAT for even a trivial problem can be as long as a week. Imagine being unable to monitor your applications just because you lost access to your authorization key.

Application monitoring with LogMill

LogMill monitors your app’s health by capturing and storing any kinds of errors or logs, removing the apprehension of taking your application to production. It reports which of the services in your application are underperforming or outright broken and must be fixed.

LogMill is designed to work with projects of any size or strength. With inbuilt collaboration features and permission driven access, it’s an application monitoring tool that allows your team to collaborate at any hierarchy or access control level. The admin can assign granular roles and access controls to each member of the team.

Ease of use is another area of strength for LogMill. It will effectively group and sort all your inputs according to your setup. The dashboard is easy to configure and to set up. Although LogMill is compatible with C# 2.0 apps out of the box, you may contact the team if you want it to be configured to a different technology.

With LogMill, say goodbye to reports and notifications flooding your inbox and configuring redirections. The tool comes inbuilt with SMTP, so all those notifications and alerts will appear in the dedicated place in the tool.

Like how it sounds? You can get started for free. Get the free trial here.