Skip to main content

Performance Testing and APM: Why You Need Both

Paola Moretto

Performance Testing (aka synthetic testing) and APM (Application Performance Management and monitoring solutions) are often regarded as two competing solutions, as if one were an alternative to the other. They are actually perfect complementary tools to achieve optimal performance for your application. Whether you develop web applications, SaaS products or mobile apps, you‘ll find both approaches to be absolutely necessary in your software operations. Here, I explain why. (I’ll use “monitoring solutions” as a synonym for APM solutions.)

Let’s talk about performance for a moment. Performance can refer to end-user performance or backend performance.

End-user performance is a measurement of the user experience as relates to speed, responsiveness and scalability. Page load time is one of the typical metrics for the user experience.

Backend performance, as the name suggests, refers to the performance of backend resources used by the application. This is something end users may not be aware of, but which is important to the way the app performs.

Let’s look at APM or monitoring solutions first. These tools are normally used to collect data from a live environment. Monitoring solutions help gather important information on the application backend metrics, server behaviors, slow components and transactions. Several application monitoring solutions track database and browser performance as well.

Monitoring is Not Enough

There are many kinds of monitoring solutions that operate at different levels of the stack, with different timing granularity, with the opportunity to define custom metrics. You have server monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, user monitoring, high-frequency metrics, and others. What is clear with monitoring solutions is that one is not enough. You probably need a portfolio of tools to have a clear understanding of what is happening with your application. Most tools have alerts systems that provide real-time information on page load and are designed to notify you in real time of events so you are immediately informed about deteriorating performance.

It doesn’t matter how comprehensive your monitoring architecture is, it doesn’t provide the full picture. First of all, live traffic is noisy. You have no control over what your users are doing and how many users you have at any given point. If you have a performance issue, that makes it really hard to troubleshoot. Was that expected behavior? Did they just hit a corner case previously unanticipated? Is a combination of the live workloads that crashed the system? So even though the technology is designed to enable real-time troubleshooting, the reality is that since it’s not a controlled environment, you might not be able to identify root cause performance issues in a timely manner.

Second and most important, the information produced by monitoring is delivered after the fact. Monitoring is like calling AAA after an accident. It’s a great service to have, but it’s much better to prevent the accident in the first place.

This explains why you need to add performance testing to the mix. While monitoring can inform you about performance after the fact, performance testing can help you prevent bad things from happening.

While monitoring is usually done on your live/production environment, performance testing usually utilizes synthetic traffic on a pre-production/staging environment. Having a pre-production environment as close as possible to your production environment will help you derive the most meaningful results.

In performance testing, users are simulated but the traffic is absolutely real. You can apply different types of loads to discover the breaking point of your application before it goes live. You can use performance testing to test with traffic that is higher than anything your actual application has seen – yet – so that you can prepare for peak of traffic.

Performance testing can also help you identify performance degradations that might have resulted from code changes, infrastructure changes or third party changes. It basically answers the question: “Can you trust this build to deliver the same user experience your users are counting on?”

In performance testing, you have total control over the amount of traffic and the workloads your users execute. That makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot.

And, if you are using Docker or containers-based architecture, you could also test performance improvements, under different configurations and platforms easily.

With performance testing, you can also measure end-to-end performance – a good indication of user experience -- which gives visibility into the entire application delivery chain, enabling greater transparency and targeted troubleshooting.

You wouldn’t build a bridge and then send hundreds of thousands of cars over it without first doing structural tests for structural problems. But you also wouldn’t open a bridge to traffic without continually monitoring how it is holding up under all the traffic. You need to do both, whether you’re talking about bridges or apps. The difference is, while a bridge is static and needs to be tested only once or at periodic intervals, software today is highly dynamic and needs to be tested on a daily basis as part of your regular flow.

Used together, performance testing and monitoring make a great team, so to speak. Use both to make sure you deploy a reliable product.

Paola Moretto is Founder and CEO of Nouvola.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 3 covers AI's impact on employees and their roles ...

Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 2 covers the challenges presented by AI, as well as solutions to those problems ...

In the final part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025 ...

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

Image
Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

Image
Datastrike

Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Performance Testing and APM: Why You Need Both

Paola Moretto

Performance Testing (aka synthetic testing) and APM (Application Performance Management and monitoring solutions) are often regarded as two competing solutions, as if one were an alternative to the other. They are actually perfect complementary tools to achieve optimal performance for your application. Whether you develop web applications, SaaS products or mobile apps, you‘ll find both approaches to be absolutely necessary in your software operations. Here, I explain why. (I’ll use “monitoring solutions” as a synonym for APM solutions.)

Let’s talk about performance for a moment. Performance can refer to end-user performance or backend performance.

End-user performance is a measurement of the user experience as relates to speed, responsiveness and scalability. Page load time is one of the typical metrics for the user experience.

Backend performance, as the name suggests, refers to the performance of backend resources used by the application. This is something end users may not be aware of, but which is important to the way the app performs.

Let’s look at APM or monitoring solutions first. These tools are normally used to collect data from a live environment. Monitoring solutions help gather important information on the application backend metrics, server behaviors, slow components and transactions. Several application monitoring solutions track database and browser performance as well.

Monitoring is Not Enough

There are many kinds of monitoring solutions that operate at different levels of the stack, with different timing granularity, with the opportunity to define custom metrics. You have server monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, user monitoring, high-frequency metrics, and others. What is clear with monitoring solutions is that one is not enough. You probably need a portfolio of tools to have a clear understanding of what is happening with your application. Most tools have alerts systems that provide real-time information on page load and are designed to notify you in real time of events so you are immediately informed about deteriorating performance.

It doesn’t matter how comprehensive your monitoring architecture is, it doesn’t provide the full picture. First of all, live traffic is noisy. You have no control over what your users are doing and how many users you have at any given point. If you have a performance issue, that makes it really hard to troubleshoot. Was that expected behavior? Did they just hit a corner case previously unanticipated? Is a combination of the live workloads that crashed the system? So even though the technology is designed to enable real-time troubleshooting, the reality is that since it’s not a controlled environment, you might not be able to identify root cause performance issues in a timely manner.

Second and most important, the information produced by monitoring is delivered after the fact. Monitoring is like calling AAA after an accident. It’s a great service to have, but it’s much better to prevent the accident in the first place.

This explains why you need to add performance testing to the mix. While monitoring can inform you about performance after the fact, performance testing can help you prevent bad things from happening.

While monitoring is usually done on your live/production environment, performance testing usually utilizes synthetic traffic on a pre-production/staging environment. Having a pre-production environment as close as possible to your production environment will help you derive the most meaningful results.

In performance testing, users are simulated but the traffic is absolutely real. You can apply different types of loads to discover the breaking point of your application before it goes live. You can use performance testing to test with traffic that is higher than anything your actual application has seen – yet – so that you can prepare for peak of traffic.

Performance testing can also help you identify performance degradations that might have resulted from code changes, infrastructure changes or third party changes. It basically answers the question: “Can you trust this build to deliver the same user experience your users are counting on?”

In performance testing, you have total control over the amount of traffic and the workloads your users execute. That makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot.

And, if you are using Docker or containers-based architecture, you could also test performance improvements, under different configurations and platforms easily.

With performance testing, you can also measure end-to-end performance – a good indication of user experience -- which gives visibility into the entire application delivery chain, enabling greater transparency and targeted troubleshooting.

You wouldn’t build a bridge and then send hundreds of thousands of cars over it without first doing structural tests for structural problems. But you also wouldn’t open a bridge to traffic without continually monitoring how it is holding up under all the traffic. You need to do both, whether you’re talking about bridges or apps. The difference is, while a bridge is static and needs to be tested only once or at periodic intervals, software today is highly dynamic and needs to be tested on a daily basis as part of your regular flow.

Used together, performance testing and monitoring make a great team, so to speak. Use both to make sure you deploy a reliable product.

Paola Moretto is Founder and CEO of Nouvola.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 3 covers AI's impact on employees and their roles ...

Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 2 covers the challenges presented by AI, as well as solutions to those problems ...

In the final part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025 ...

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

Image
Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

Image
Datastrike

Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...