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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

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...