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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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While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

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

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...