When it comes to the performance of your applications, regardless of where they’re hosted, its performance determines not only the efficiency of your entire network, but also the experience had by users. While performance issues are a headache for all IT managers, apps used by customers and/or internal workers must continually operate according to the highest standards. If an application should experience continual issues regarding its performance, you should adopt an effective APM solution capable of creating and monitoring several performance metrics.
Essential Performance Metrics for Application Management
Although there are many different elements you must look for in an APM tool, when it comes to performance metrics there are several specific metric systems utilized to ensure your application continuously runs at its optimum rate. These important performance metrics include:
- Failures to Reconnect – This metric measures the number of requests made, but were unsuccessful, which is essential to determine how many users are unable to successfully utilize the application. An having a process in place for monitoring application performance is a great way to keep tabs on this.
- Connection Delay Duration – While the application may connect to its necessary servers and networks, if there is a delay in establishing this connection you may find customers and users abandoning the application, which may result in a drop in revenue or confidence in your business.
- Current Active Connections – Being able to monitor the number of active connections within any single application ensures your bandwidth matches the server requirements for that particular app.
- Active Connection Peak Levels – Part of managing the performance of an application is being able to delve into the behavior of the application during its peak traffic moments.
- Number of Leaked Connections – Leaked application connections occur when a connection to your database is opened and for some reason the application does not close the connection upon completion of its event. Monitoring leaked connections is an important element when it comes to identifying issues and errors within a database and application coding.
- Total Transaction Count – Monitoring the total number of transactions is one of the most effective ways of managing the overall performance of your applications. Any APM tool should be able to give you these metrics on a real-time basis as well as in overall, or general, reports.
Other application performance metrics you must be continually aware of include:
- Cache Access Count
- Beans in Current Use Count
- Activation Count
- Passivation Count
- Number of Open Sockets
- Backlog Acceptance
- Total Invocation Count
In addition to monitoring application performance, it’s also important to ensure that your servers are functioning properly and that you’re using a good quality hosting company. If you end up using a lower-tier shared host, it’s possibly that your performance metrics could really suffer. It’s really important to look at how well a hosting company maintains their servers too. For example, when comparing Bluehost and GoDaddy, it appears that Bluehost does a better job of maintaining their servers and keeping things user-friendly, according to WebHostingBuddy. Also, keep in mind that there’s a big difference between shared hosting and VPS hosting, and other tiers of web hosts, so that’s something to consider as well.