Skip to main content

4 Best Practices for APM in the Cloud

Moving your applications to the cloud has undeniable benefits. The cloud offers dynamic environments where you can spin up instances quickly, only consume what you need, and eliminate the costs of renting or purchasing expensive servers.

But the cloud also means developers are building software on a platform they don't "own", where things can change in an instant. There is no real-time insight into the performance and health of the infrastructure, to say nothing of the applications that run on it.

When things go wrong, it's hard to know where the bottlenecks are. Is the application consuming too much CPU? Is an unresponsive API causing it to time out? Is network latency degrading application performance? How do you know what you don't know?

These issues eat into your bottom line and negatively impact customer satisfaction. And while you can't anticipate every potential problem, you can be prepared to avoid many of them.

Here are four best practices to optimize your application performance monitoring:

1. Collaboration

Invite other team members to participate in your APM tool. You can set role-based access controls that grant edit privileges to admins, or restrict read-only users to see only systems with a certain tag. This gives users access to the features and data they need to do their jobs, without distracting them with superfluous information.

Some products offer deep URLs to facilitate information sharing across teams, and also allow you to annotate important events that correlate to subsequent performance changes.

2. Tagging

Alerts defined by tags allow you to customize how, when and why you're being notified about the performance of your applications. For instance, if you have a set of front-end application servers behind a load balancer, you may want to tag them "frontend" and create a unique alert for each set of performance metrics that you want to monitor.

When used correctly, include and exclude tags, process alerting and threshold alerts can help users react quickly and efficiently to solve performance issues.

3. Automation

The self-service, automated provisioning of IT resources has come of age and is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Chef and Puppet are two popular orchestration engines that allow you to spin servers up and down in response to evolving business needs. Your APM solution should integrate tightly with existing automation tools, modifying automatically in response to operating environment changes, and providing real-time visibility into all your Chef- and Puppet-deployed applications and services.

4. Custom metrics

No two businesses have the same goals and objectives. The same can be said for application performance monitoring metrics. Custom metrics provide enhanced visibility into specific areas of an application where you want to collect, view or analyze additional information – such as page load time, web transaction response time or database query execution time. Setting these up should be as easy as modifying a simple script and creating a custom dashboard to display your data.

ABOUT Josh Stephens

As Vice President of Product Strategy at Idera, Josh Stephens brings nearly 20 years of experience in the technology industry. Prior to Idera, he founded a consulting and technology company focused on helping companies adapt their product and go to market strategies to take advantage of the high velocity, inside sales model focused around inbound marketing and social media. Previously, he was VP of technology at SolarWinds where he spent more than a dozen years helping to define and innovate their product and go to market strategies. Earlier in his career, Stephens spent time at Greenwich Technology Partners, International Network Services, and the United States Air Force.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

4 Best Practices for APM in the Cloud

Moving your applications to the cloud has undeniable benefits. The cloud offers dynamic environments where you can spin up instances quickly, only consume what you need, and eliminate the costs of renting or purchasing expensive servers.

But the cloud also means developers are building software on a platform they don't "own", where things can change in an instant. There is no real-time insight into the performance and health of the infrastructure, to say nothing of the applications that run on it.

When things go wrong, it's hard to know where the bottlenecks are. Is the application consuming too much CPU? Is an unresponsive API causing it to time out? Is network latency degrading application performance? How do you know what you don't know?

These issues eat into your bottom line and negatively impact customer satisfaction. And while you can't anticipate every potential problem, you can be prepared to avoid many of them.

Here are four best practices to optimize your application performance monitoring:

1. Collaboration

Invite other team members to participate in your APM tool. You can set role-based access controls that grant edit privileges to admins, or restrict read-only users to see only systems with a certain tag. This gives users access to the features and data they need to do their jobs, without distracting them with superfluous information.

Some products offer deep URLs to facilitate information sharing across teams, and also allow you to annotate important events that correlate to subsequent performance changes.

2. Tagging

Alerts defined by tags allow you to customize how, when and why you're being notified about the performance of your applications. For instance, if you have a set of front-end application servers behind a load balancer, you may want to tag them "frontend" and create a unique alert for each set of performance metrics that you want to monitor.

When used correctly, include and exclude tags, process alerting and threshold alerts can help users react quickly and efficiently to solve performance issues.

3. Automation

The self-service, automated provisioning of IT resources has come of age and is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Chef and Puppet are two popular orchestration engines that allow you to spin servers up and down in response to evolving business needs. Your APM solution should integrate tightly with existing automation tools, modifying automatically in response to operating environment changes, and providing real-time visibility into all your Chef- and Puppet-deployed applications and services.

4. Custom metrics

No two businesses have the same goals and objectives. The same can be said for application performance monitoring metrics. Custom metrics provide enhanced visibility into specific areas of an application where you want to collect, view or analyze additional information – such as page load time, web transaction response time or database query execution time. Setting these up should be as easy as modifying a simple script and creating a custom dashboard to display your data.

ABOUT Josh Stephens

As Vice President of Product Strategy at Idera, Josh Stephens brings nearly 20 years of experience in the technology industry. Prior to Idera, he founded a consulting and technology company focused on helping companies adapt their product and go to market strategies to take advantage of the high velocity, inside sales model focused around inbound marketing and social media. Previously, he was VP of technology at SolarWinds where he spent more than a dozen years helping to define and innovate their product and go to market strategies. Earlier in his career, Stephens spent time at Greenwich Technology Partners, International Network Services, and the United States Air Force.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...