Skip to main content

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

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 ...

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

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 ...