Application Performance Management (APM)

Last Updated: April 17, 2017

Definition - What does Application Performance Management (APM) mean?

Application performance management (APM) is a practice within systems management that targets managing and tracking the availability and efficiency of software applications. APM involves translating IT metrics into business meaning. It examines the workflow and the associated IT tools that are deployed to analyze, identify and report application performance concerns to make sure the expectations of businesses and end-users are met.

Application performance signifies how quickly transactions are accomplished or details are sent to end-users using a particular application. Application performance management is commonly used for Web applications built on Microsoft .NET and JEE platforms.

Techopedia explains Application Performance Management (APM)

APM monitors performance in two steps:

It measures the resources that are used by the application
It measures the experience of end-users, which has two components: The time taken for the application to respond from an end-user's perspective, and the number of transactions that go through the system in the course of response-time calculations.

These methods will eventually help to create a performance baseline consisting of three high-level categories:

Response times/transaction performance
Resource consumption
Transaction volume

Application performance management is associated with real-user management and end-user experience management. Among these, assessing the experiences of real users while using an application in production is regarded as the most genuine method. Optimum productivity can be accomplished more effectively by means of event correlation, predictive analysis and system automation.

According to research conducted by Gartner, APM consists of five unique functional dimensions: