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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

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

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Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

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