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Why APM is Valuable to Every Part of Your Business

Matt Watson

Virtually every business depends on mission-critical software to run their business. Any slight application slowdown or outage can lead to legions of unhappy employees or customers. Application Performance Management (APM) solutions can help monitor for performance issues, but they can also be used to gain insights to proactively improve performance as well.

APM is not just a tool for IT Operations. APM has grown into an essential tool that can be utilized by many departments within your business.

IT Operations

When you think of APM, you normally think about IT operations using it for monitoring mission-critical applications. Instead of only monitoring servers and infrastructure, APM solutions can help better track performance at the application level. Including overall performance, key transactions, and much, much more.

Development Teams

APM solutions collect a lot of data. Including code level performance, overall application usage and performance, metrics, log messages, errors, real user monitoring, and more. All of this data can be very valuable for developers when it comes to researching bugs in production. It can also be used to identify parts of an application that can be optimized and validating those performance optimizations.

Developers can also use APM in QA to test and validate the performance of their code before it gets to production.

QA

Traditionally, APM is thought to be used mostly in production. However, APM can be extremely valuable as part of your QA process to find problems before they get to production. It could be used to look for any overall change in performance, new application errors found, load testing validation and more.

Database Administrators

Most APM solutions track the performance of SQL queries. This can be useful information for your DBAs to augment other tools they may also have. They could potentially use APM for various monitoring capabilities. For example, monitoring how often a specific SQL query is taking or how often it is being called.

Product Owners and Executives

The product owner ultimately cares a lot about the application, its functionality, usage, service availability and performance. APM gives product owners visibility into the performance of their application and potentially into metrics around how much it is being used. APM dashboards are popular with product owners and other executives in a company.

Customer Service

When a customer calls and says your application is slow, what do you do? After a quick login test to your app, your customer service member would likely tell the customer that everything seems to be working fine, and the problem is likely on their end.

The problem is a user could be accessing your application on a different server, database, or even in a different data center. If your customer service team has access to basic APM dashboards, they could leverage those to better understand if any application problems may exist or not with more certainty. They also wouldn’t have to bug the IT department every time a customer complains.

Sales and Marketing

Major application outages are always a big PR problem for marketing teams, but hopefully they can use it to instead rave about how fast your application is! They could also use it to gather insights into how parts of your application are being used. Just like your customer service team, your sales team is going to get flooded with calls if your site is down.

Conclusion

Application performance is important to your entire business. APM solutions collect an amazing out of data and usually provide very flexible reporting options. I would encourage you to think of ways to leverage the value of it anywhere that you can.

Matt Watson is Founder and CEO of Stackify.

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Why APM is Valuable to Every Part of Your Business

Matt Watson

Virtually every business depends on mission-critical software to run their business. Any slight application slowdown or outage can lead to legions of unhappy employees or customers. Application Performance Management (APM) solutions can help monitor for performance issues, but they can also be used to gain insights to proactively improve performance as well.

APM is not just a tool for IT Operations. APM has grown into an essential tool that can be utilized by many departments within your business.

IT Operations

When you think of APM, you normally think about IT operations using it for monitoring mission-critical applications. Instead of only monitoring servers and infrastructure, APM solutions can help better track performance at the application level. Including overall performance, key transactions, and much, much more.

Development Teams

APM solutions collect a lot of data. Including code level performance, overall application usage and performance, metrics, log messages, errors, real user monitoring, and more. All of this data can be very valuable for developers when it comes to researching bugs in production. It can also be used to identify parts of an application that can be optimized and validating those performance optimizations.

Developers can also use APM in QA to test and validate the performance of their code before it gets to production.

QA

Traditionally, APM is thought to be used mostly in production. However, APM can be extremely valuable as part of your QA process to find problems before they get to production. It could be used to look for any overall change in performance, new application errors found, load testing validation and more.

Database Administrators

Most APM solutions track the performance of SQL queries. This can be useful information for your DBAs to augment other tools they may also have. They could potentially use APM for various monitoring capabilities. For example, monitoring how often a specific SQL query is taking or how often it is being called.

Product Owners and Executives

The product owner ultimately cares a lot about the application, its functionality, usage, service availability and performance. APM gives product owners visibility into the performance of their application and potentially into metrics around how much it is being used. APM dashboards are popular with product owners and other executives in a company.

Customer Service

When a customer calls and says your application is slow, what do you do? After a quick login test to your app, your customer service member would likely tell the customer that everything seems to be working fine, and the problem is likely on their end.

The problem is a user could be accessing your application on a different server, database, or even in a different data center. If your customer service team has access to basic APM dashboards, they could leverage those to better understand if any application problems may exist or not with more certainty. They also wouldn’t have to bug the IT department every time a customer complains.

Sales and Marketing

Major application outages are always a big PR problem for marketing teams, but hopefully they can use it to instead rave about how fast your application is! They could also use it to gather insights into how parts of your application are being used. Just like your customer service team, your sales team is going to get flooded with calls if your site is down.

Conclusion

Application performance is important to your entire business. APM solutions collect an amazing out of data and usually provide very flexible reporting options. I would encourage you to think of ways to leverage the value of it anywhere that you can.

Matt Watson is Founder and CEO of Stackify.

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 ...