Skip to main content

5 APM Techniques to Troubleshoot Application Slow Down in Minutes

Payal Chakravarty

Applications are getting more complex by the day. First you have the various hosting platforms that your app can span across like private cloud, public cloud, your own data center.

Second, you have applications for the web being accessed through different browsers and mobile apps being accessed from several hundred different devices and various device OSs.

Third, the same app is being accessed from around the world, 24X7.

Fourth, the number of users accessing apps have grown significantly requiring rapid scalability of the app's infrastructure.

To top it all, users, today, have very little patience to deal with poor performance.

Application Performance Management (APM) tools have evolved over the last decade to cater to this complexity and yet be able to troubleshoot application performance issues quickly. Let us look at some of the key features and visualization techniques that are enabling quicker troubleshooting:

1. End User Experience Metrics sliced by different dimensions

As an app developer or app owner, the first step to troubleshooting a performance problem is to narrow the scope of it. By comparing how long it is taking a web page to load for a user using your app through Firefox on Mac vs how long it is taking for the same web page to load for a user using Chrome on iOS, you can narrow down which browser and device to troubleshoot on. You could also compare how long the response time is for a user in California vs a user in Australia when accessing the same page and executing the same transaction. By slicing and dicing response time by various dimensions like geography, browser, device, network carrier etc isolation of problem areas have become easier.

2. Code level stack traces

For every business transaction that fails or is slow, you can find out what line of code is causing the slowdown by looking at its stack trace. APM tools today show the class name, method name and exact line of source code (e.g., SQL query, line number of code in a specific browser session trace) that led to a slow request. Further, you can see the pre- and post-code deployment patterns for your apps.

3. Transaction Topologies

Today, APM tools can automatically discover your end-to-end distributed application environment in minutes, showing you a topological view of all the components that your app depends on and hence aid visual detection of bottlenecks. A few of these tools not only show an aggregated transaction topology, but also show the detailed topological mapping for single transaction instances, capturing network hops and sub-transaction nodes to help you see where the time is spent during that instance. With the evolution of big data technologies, it is now possible to capture 100% transactions instead of sampling. This ensures you will not lose out on any key business transactions that may have failed.

4. Log analytics

Searching for errors across application stacks can be a laborious task. Earlier, while troubleshooting, operators, administrators and app owners would have to look through logs from different components independently, in silos. With integrated log analytics, you can now search for errors across log files for any component in your app stack in the context of the application. For example, you can correlate errors in your app server with an error in your database that may be impacting a transaction.

5. One pane-of-glass to view health of all components in the app stack

As opposed to looking at multiple panes of glass to see details of your application's health, today, at a glance in one UI you will be able to visualize the detailed health of all your app components. Spotting the problem area is as easy as spotting a color difference. For example, key metrics — like Garbage collection statistics from your code's runtime, memory usage of your VM, space utilization of your database server, bandwidth utilization of your network, http request response times of your web requests — can all be seen in one user interface.

With the evolution of big data, improved algorithms for search and correlation, smart dashboards/visualization and diagnostic capabilities, APM tools have matured to provide insights that you could never have before, thereby cutting troubleshooting time from days to minutes.

Payal Chakravarty is Senior Product Manager for IBM Application Performance Management.

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 ...

5 APM Techniques to Troubleshoot Application Slow Down in Minutes

Payal Chakravarty

Applications are getting more complex by the day. First you have the various hosting platforms that your app can span across like private cloud, public cloud, your own data center.

Second, you have applications for the web being accessed through different browsers and mobile apps being accessed from several hundred different devices and various device OSs.

Third, the same app is being accessed from around the world, 24X7.

Fourth, the number of users accessing apps have grown significantly requiring rapid scalability of the app's infrastructure.

To top it all, users, today, have very little patience to deal with poor performance.

Application Performance Management (APM) tools have evolved over the last decade to cater to this complexity and yet be able to troubleshoot application performance issues quickly. Let us look at some of the key features and visualization techniques that are enabling quicker troubleshooting:

1. End User Experience Metrics sliced by different dimensions

As an app developer or app owner, the first step to troubleshooting a performance problem is to narrow the scope of it. By comparing how long it is taking a web page to load for a user using your app through Firefox on Mac vs how long it is taking for the same web page to load for a user using Chrome on iOS, you can narrow down which browser and device to troubleshoot on. You could also compare how long the response time is for a user in California vs a user in Australia when accessing the same page and executing the same transaction. By slicing and dicing response time by various dimensions like geography, browser, device, network carrier etc isolation of problem areas have become easier.

2. Code level stack traces

For every business transaction that fails or is slow, you can find out what line of code is causing the slowdown by looking at its stack trace. APM tools today show the class name, method name and exact line of source code (e.g., SQL query, line number of code in a specific browser session trace) that led to a slow request. Further, you can see the pre- and post-code deployment patterns for your apps.

3. Transaction Topologies

Today, APM tools can automatically discover your end-to-end distributed application environment in minutes, showing you a topological view of all the components that your app depends on and hence aid visual detection of bottlenecks. A few of these tools not only show an aggregated transaction topology, but also show the detailed topological mapping for single transaction instances, capturing network hops and sub-transaction nodes to help you see where the time is spent during that instance. With the evolution of big data technologies, it is now possible to capture 100% transactions instead of sampling. This ensures you will not lose out on any key business transactions that may have failed.

4. Log analytics

Searching for errors across application stacks can be a laborious task. Earlier, while troubleshooting, operators, administrators and app owners would have to look through logs from different components independently, in silos. With integrated log analytics, you can now search for errors across log files for any component in your app stack in the context of the application. For example, you can correlate errors in your app server with an error in your database that may be impacting a transaction.

5. One pane-of-glass to view health of all components in the app stack

As opposed to looking at multiple panes of glass to see details of your application's health, today, at a glance in one UI you will be able to visualize the detailed health of all your app components. Spotting the problem area is as easy as spotting a color difference. For example, key metrics — like Garbage collection statistics from your code's runtime, memory usage of your VM, space utilization of your database server, bandwidth utilization of your network, http request response times of your web requests — can all be seen in one user interface.

With the evolution of big data, improved algorithms for search and correlation, smart dashboards/visualization and diagnostic capabilities, APM tools have matured to provide insights that you could never have before, thereby cutting troubleshooting time from days to minutes.

Payal Chakravarty is Senior Product Manager for IBM Application Performance Management.

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 ...