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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

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Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

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

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ...