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APM and Application Stability: Where Two Monitoring Roads Merge and Diverge - Part 2

James Smith
SmartBear

In today's iterative world, development teams care a lot more about how apps are running. There's a demand for fixing actionable items. Developers want to know exactly what's broken, what to fix right now, and what can wait. They want to know, "Do we build or fix?" This trade-off between building new features versus fixing bugs is one of the key factors behind the adoption of Application Stability management tools.

Start with APM and Application Stability: Where Two Monitoring Roads Merge and Diverge - Part 1

Benefits of Application Stability

The beauty of Application Stability is that it brings together the errors captured by APM and enables developers to see at a glance which ones are worth fixing. As a result, five major benefits arise:

1. Increased efficiency: Companies eliminate the problem of infrastructure teams tossing issues over the fence to development teams. Valuable time is saved because Application Stability tools remove the game of telephone between the two teams and deliver bugs directly to the team that will fix them.

2. Stronger CSAT: The time to fix bugs goes down dramatically when the person who wrote the code fixes the code. With diagnostic information in hand from the Application Stability tool, software engineers innately understand what the code does, what the bug means, and how to fix it. Faster resolution of bugs that impact the end user experience means that customer satisfaction levels (CSAT) are less likely to drop.

3. Error prioritization: Application Stability tools group bugs by root cause, making it easy for developers to get a sense of severity at a glance. It's much easier to determine what to fix first when developers can see which errors are most costly, which affect the most customers, and which bug is impacting a key customer.

4. Tool synchronization: Taking it one step further, Application Stability tools are tied into project management suites. Bugs map directly to tickets created in Jira (or whatever tool is used), and tickets update automatically as priority changes.

5. Stability scores by release: Application Stability enables product and development teams to see stability scores by release. Since it's common to have multiple app versions live at the same time, especially with mobile apps (where DevOps isn't really involved), companies can't rely on a single stability score. Teams need to see stability by release so that it's clear exactly where the errors are and what impact they're having on users.

What Percentage of Your Development Team Has a Login to Your APM?

I'm often asked whether I think Application Stability will replace APM, and my answer is simple: No, I don't

I'm often asked whether I think Application Stability will replace APM, and my answer is simple: No, I don't. APM remains an essential part of developing software, and organizations still need to understand when they're about to run out of resources and when there's poor performance. 

Instead, I see these two solutions co-existing as adjacent categories but helping different teams. Application Stability delivers prioritized errors to developers for fixing, while APM works well for enabling Ops teams to raise red flags on high error rates and reduce cloud spend.

Some of you may be thinking to yourself, "Well, my APM product does what you're describing for application stability, so I'm sure my developers are fine using it."

To which I poise the following challenge: What percentage of your dev team has a login to your APM? What percentage logs in on a daily basis? And, if they do use it, do your developers like it?

The answers to these questions may surprise you. After all, APM wasn't really built for developers or for keeping end users happy. In contrast, Application Stability was born at the customer layer and is designed specifically to monitor the front end and ensure strong customer experiences with web and mobile apps.

Once you've had a chance to hear from your dev team, it wouldn't surprise me if you discover that they're pretty excited about the new kid in town.

James Smith is SVP of the Bugsnag Product Group at SmartBear

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APM and Application Stability: Where Two Monitoring Roads Merge and Diverge - Part 2

James Smith
SmartBear

In today's iterative world, development teams care a lot more about how apps are running. There's a demand for fixing actionable items. Developers want to know exactly what's broken, what to fix right now, and what can wait. They want to know, "Do we build or fix?" This trade-off between building new features versus fixing bugs is one of the key factors behind the adoption of Application Stability management tools.

Start with APM and Application Stability: Where Two Monitoring Roads Merge and Diverge - Part 1

Benefits of Application Stability

The beauty of Application Stability is that it brings together the errors captured by APM and enables developers to see at a glance which ones are worth fixing. As a result, five major benefits arise:

1. Increased efficiency: Companies eliminate the problem of infrastructure teams tossing issues over the fence to development teams. Valuable time is saved because Application Stability tools remove the game of telephone between the two teams and deliver bugs directly to the team that will fix them.

2. Stronger CSAT: The time to fix bugs goes down dramatically when the person who wrote the code fixes the code. With diagnostic information in hand from the Application Stability tool, software engineers innately understand what the code does, what the bug means, and how to fix it. Faster resolution of bugs that impact the end user experience means that customer satisfaction levels (CSAT) are less likely to drop.

3. Error prioritization: Application Stability tools group bugs by root cause, making it easy for developers to get a sense of severity at a glance. It's much easier to determine what to fix first when developers can see which errors are most costly, which affect the most customers, and which bug is impacting a key customer.

4. Tool synchronization: Taking it one step further, Application Stability tools are tied into project management suites. Bugs map directly to tickets created in Jira (or whatever tool is used), and tickets update automatically as priority changes.

5. Stability scores by release: Application Stability enables product and development teams to see stability scores by release. Since it's common to have multiple app versions live at the same time, especially with mobile apps (where DevOps isn't really involved), companies can't rely on a single stability score. Teams need to see stability by release so that it's clear exactly where the errors are and what impact they're having on users.

What Percentage of Your Development Team Has a Login to Your APM?

I'm often asked whether I think Application Stability will replace APM, and my answer is simple: No, I don't

I'm often asked whether I think Application Stability will replace APM, and my answer is simple: No, I don't. APM remains an essential part of developing software, and organizations still need to understand when they're about to run out of resources and when there's poor performance. 

Instead, I see these two solutions co-existing as adjacent categories but helping different teams. Application Stability delivers prioritized errors to developers for fixing, while APM works well for enabling Ops teams to raise red flags on high error rates and reduce cloud spend.

Some of you may be thinking to yourself, "Well, my APM product does what you're describing for application stability, so I'm sure my developers are fine using it."

To which I poise the following challenge: What percentage of your dev team has a login to your APM? What percentage logs in on a daily basis? And, if they do use it, do your developers like it?

The answers to these questions may surprise you. After all, APM wasn't really built for developers or for keeping end users happy. In contrast, Application Stability was born at the customer layer and is designed specifically to monitor the front end and ensure strong customer experiences with web and mobile apps.

Once you've had a chance to hear from your dev team, it wouldn't surprise me if you discover that they're pretty excited about the new kid in town.

James Smith is SVP of the Bugsnag Product Group at SmartBear

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...