What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 2

APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry for their opinions on what IT departments should be monitoring to ensure digital performance. Part 2 covers key performance metrics like availability and response time.

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 1

AVAILABILITY

To ensure digital performance, availability is one of three key performance areas I always recommend monitoring. Your applications and networks must first be available to service users and customers. Otherwise, they're useful to no one.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

Monitoring the login page of an application with a synthetic transaction is an essential part of an Enterprise Monitoring strategy. Active monitoring is a good starting point to provide visibility on application availability especially when monitoring outside the Data Center. Synthetic Transactions can provide location-based availability and act as a barometer for measuring application performance.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

Read Larry Dragich's latest blog: Digital Intelligence - Why Traditional APM Tools Aren't Sufficient

Read Larry Dragich's new white paper: The Case for Converged Application & Infrastructure Performance Monitoring

INFRASTRUCTURE RISK

Understanding Infrastructure Risk is a key component of monitoring that most organizations miss. APM tools do a great job of tracking left-to-right performance across an application, and modern application designs ensure that no single component can cause a failure. Building an understanding of the risk inherent in the current IT infrastructure — below the application — is critical for stopping unexpected downtime and sudden capacity limits. You can do that by tracking links from between overlay and underlay networks, file systems to storage units, and hypervisor to server hardware — or you can use a unified monitoring tool do do it for you. Key buying decision — can you see the IT infrastructure risk for the specific components that your application relies on?
Kent Erickson
Alliance Strategist, Zenoss

THROUGHPUT

To ensure digital performance, throughput is one of three key performance areas that must be included. Applications and networks must be able to provide all the relevant data that is required to fulfill a specific request. Monitoring throughput ensures you know when your systems do not deliver all of the data that was requested, and you can act on it before the complaints come in.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

PAGE LOAD SPEED

Ultimately you want to be monitoring everything that impacts customer experience and conversion rates, but the most important thing is the page load speed. This drives more conversions than any other factor. And the key pages are those at the beginning of a user journey since the more time someone has invested in the process the less likely they are to abandon.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Eggplant

RESPONSE TIME

To ensure digital performance, response time is one of three key performance areas that must not be forgotten. Requests for specific information from users must be fulfilled with as much speed as possible. This is a common expectation of every IT system, so you should be monitoring them.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

Monitor application response from user to application (last mile) and application to the data (middle mile) to not only measure is the app up but of it is working.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud

TRANSACTION UPTIME

A good starting point is to implement end-to-end performance monitoring with real transaction uptime to complement your APM tools.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CSO, Apica

TIME TO FIRST BYTE

Initial motivation in the user journey can be lost very quickly if for example the first time the user clicks on an advertisement or logs into an application is not performant. The appearance of performance is important; monitoring time to first byte (TTFB)can help ascertain the experience of what a user sees marching towards a minimum viable/viewable product (MVP) of the page or app before being loaded to completion. TTFB is a leading indicator on web performance to the end user and also is used by the leading search engines in factoring in page rank as the more performant pages get a higher rank.
Ravi Lachhman
Evangelist, AppDynamics

LOG EVENTS

If it has an IP address, it sends logs, and logs must be monitored to gain detailed insight on server performance, security, error messages or underlying issues.
Clayton Dukes
CEO, LogZilla

Logs have been around since the dawn of computing, but with constantly increasing threats, logs are more important than ever. Log events are one of the key data sources SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions use for threat detection.
Otis Gospodnetić
Founder, Sematext

Read What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 3, covering the development side.

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What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 2

APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry for their opinions on what IT departments should be monitoring to ensure digital performance. Part 2 covers key performance metrics like availability and response time.

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 1

AVAILABILITY

To ensure digital performance, availability is one of three key performance areas I always recommend monitoring. Your applications and networks must first be available to service users and customers. Otherwise, they're useful to no one.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

Monitoring the login page of an application with a synthetic transaction is an essential part of an Enterprise Monitoring strategy. Active monitoring is a good starting point to provide visibility on application availability especially when monitoring outside the Data Center. Synthetic Transactions can provide location-based availability and act as a barometer for measuring application performance.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

Read Larry Dragich's latest blog: Digital Intelligence - Why Traditional APM Tools Aren't Sufficient

Read Larry Dragich's new white paper: The Case for Converged Application & Infrastructure Performance Monitoring

INFRASTRUCTURE RISK

Understanding Infrastructure Risk is a key component of monitoring that most organizations miss. APM tools do a great job of tracking left-to-right performance across an application, and modern application designs ensure that no single component can cause a failure. Building an understanding of the risk inherent in the current IT infrastructure — below the application — is critical for stopping unexpected downtime and sudden capacity limits. You can do that by tracking links from between overlay and underlay networks, file systems to storage units, and hypervisor to server hardware — or you can use a unified monitoring tool do do it for you. Key buying decision — can you see the IT infrastructure risk for the specific components that your application relies on?
Kent Erickson
Alliance Strategist, Zenoss

THROUGHPUT

To ensure digital performance, throughput is one of three key performance areas that must be included. Applications and networks must be able to provide all the relevant data that is required to fulfill a specific request. Monitoring throughput ensures you know when your systems do not deliver all of the data that was requested, and you can act on it before the complaints come in.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

PAGE LOAD SPEED

Ultimately you want to be monitoring everything that impacts customer experience and conversion rates, but the most important thing is the page load speed. This drives more conversions than any other factor. And the key pages are those at the beginning of a user journey since the more time someone has invested in the process the less likely they are to abandon.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Eggplant

RESPONSE TIME

To ensure digital performance, response time is one of three key performance areas that must not be forgotten. Requests for specific information from users must be fulfilled with as much speed as possible. This is a common expectation of every IT system, so you should be monitoring them.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

Monitor application response from user to application (last mile) and application to the data (middle mile) to not only measure is the app up but of it is working.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud

TRANSACTION UPTIME

A good starting point is to implement end-to-end performance monitoring with real transaction uptime to complement your APM tools.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CSO, Apica

TIME TO FIRST BYTE

Initial motivation in the user journey can be lost very quickly if for example the first time the user clicks on an advertisement or logs into an application is not performant. The appearance of performance is important; monitoring time to first byte (TTFB)can help ascertain the experience of what a user sees marching towards a minimum viable/viewable product (MVP) of the page or app before being loaded to completion. TTFB is a leading indicator on web performance to the end user and also is used by the leading search engines in factoring in page rank as the more performant pages get a higher rank.
Ravi Lachhman
Evangelist, AppDynamics

LOG EVENTS

If it has an IP address, it sends logs, and logs must be monitored to gain detailed insight on server performance, security, error messages or underlying issues.
Clayton Dukes
CEO, LogZilla

Logs have been around since the dawn of computing, but with constantly increasing threats, logs are more important than ever. Log events are one of the key data sources SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions use for threat detection.
Otis Gospodnetić
Founder, Sematext

Read What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 3, covering the development side.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Observability Is the New Control Plane for Enterprise Transformation

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

When AI Becomes the Corporate OS

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

The $600 Billion Wake Up Call

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Breaking Down Agentic AI Fragmentation and Complexity with Governance

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud Spend Is Rising and Cloud Optimization Is Key to Funding AI and Protecting Margins

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

Building AI Agents That Build Trust

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...