A business without an application performance monitoring tool runs the risk of losing customers fast. At the core of ensuring the best possible application for their customers is the use of performance tools. The metrics that monitoring tools provide will give an insight into how the web application will behave.
With the use of APM tools, DevOps teams know when an issue arises and how to fix it. They also find out what risks are there so they can tackle them before it wreaks havoc in their systems.
However, the market has a plethora of APM tools available that target specific metrics which support developers. However, are they really being optimized to support you? With the number of tools available, complexity also rises.
To tackle the complexities caused by employing multiple monitoring tools and metrics, it is highly advised to consolidate everything. This means bringing together everything into one simple and customizable dashboard that will give you everything that you need.
Why You Should Consider APM Tool Consolidation
Here’s why you should consider APM Tool Consolidation:
The Future is Technology
Our technology is rapidly improving. With speedy development also comes the complexity of code. With increased complexities is the risk of increased errors. If the risks are left unchecked, these errors can have unwanted effects on a business.
Businesses are now adopting hybrid or completely cloud environments. Gone are the days when people needed to have all hardware in the same place. While this revolution is allowing many companies to expand and grow, it is bringing up new areas of challenges.
The trend for cloud adoption is going upward. In 2021, Zippia recorded 18.4% growth in public cloud services, compared to 6.1% in 2020. The same report shows that 80% of companies they studied reported improvements in operations.
The future is going to be all technology. Modern software will drive companies toward innovation. But how do development and operations teams ensure the company’s survival?
Complexities Require Simplification
If your development team wants to stay on top of the game, you will have to know what problems you are going to be faced with. To overcome these complexities of technological growth, your team may employ a combination of proprietary and open-source tools.
BUT
You can become over-prepared and lose touch with what you need to focus on. There may be too many tools at your disposal, and not optimizing them can become your biggest mistake. What you can end up with are the following scenarios:
- Creation of data silos, which can bring about blind spots for your team to ignore
- Inefficiencies caused by constantly switching from one tool to the other, especially when your team is under pressure troubleshooting an error
- Disconnected tool sets causing difficulties in data correlation, or the lack thereof
- Increased mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) of errors
- The solution to the issue could be short-term and cannot be scaled up or be reliable
- If there are many proprietary tools, then it may drive up your costs for licensing monitoring tools
- There may be hidden costs that you are not aware of while using some of the application monitoring tools
The list shows a lot of issues. You may be wondering why. The only reason you used all these tools was to empower your developing team, but it is possibly slowing you down. This is why you need to start consolidating your application tools.
Bringing Everything Together
Being aware that there could be problems is a good start for you. It is time for you to rethink the way you use your APM tools. After all, APM tools provide you with observability. And observability is supposed to provide you with the following
- A single stream of information that provides you with monitoring data
- Breaks down the data silos for you to understand and solve problems efficiently
- Provides you with a clear picture of the issues and supports greater productivity
- Provide you with data that helps you make better business decisions
For efficient and effective observability, you need everything in one place. Simplify your process. All complex information is delivered to you and your teams in a simple and easy to understand so that you can make the right moves forward.
The Benefits of APM Tool Consolidation
Consolidate your tools. Just do it. You already know what is going to happen if you don’t. Here are some benefits:
Single-Source Data That Represents the Truth
Consolidation means bringing everything together. When you do that for your company, you allow for a lot of ease. The way you collect your data matters. It determines what is being analyzed and what information you will get from it.
With scatter monitoring tools, the data and information you receive will also be scattered. That is why you need to bring it all into one single place. Empower your team by making their lives easier. Use a tool that will consolidate them onto a single dashboard. Not only does it focus on the data and information your company requires most, but it also neatly presents all the information so that you can make decisions faster.
Bringing everything together creates single-source data that you can study. You see everything in one place, and it helps you make comparisons swiftly. There is no need for you to go back and forth between software, windows, etc. all are brought together in one place. You can now focus on the performance.
The consolidation also helps you map out dependencies in your architecture, providing you with a holistic picture of your environment. This can be done across teams and across various tools that you use. You can see the performance, infrastructure, user experience, and logs in one single place.
Establish a Standard that Everyone in the Organization Can Follow
With the consolidation of your APM tools, your company develops a standard. This is streamlined for everybody to use. It would be the same for those who are coming to your office or those who are remote.
Your organization can collect data from every system within minutes. Once the APM tools are consolidated for your organization, you can easily share them with all our teams. You bring everyone on the same page. That means you will waste less time trying to explain different processes or information to your colleagues. You and your colleagues already know where the data comes from. Collectively, you also know what metrics matter to your company.
Standardization helps provide ease in communication and increase efficiency. This then allows you and your organization to move on to make better decisions and work on other improvements or even a new product for your customers.
Simplified Complexities and Improved Collaborations
The consolidation of all your APM tools simplify a lot of your work. It reduces complexities and makes access to information easy.
It provides standardization which then helps improve collaborations between your company’s departments. Cross-department communication because less tedious. Developers do not have to explain everything from scratch to the Ops teams or vice versa.
Since it has become easy to communicate, it has become easy to collaborate. The company can benefit from this cross-department decision-making. Consolidation also democratizes decision-making and helps move the company forward.
Get to the Bottom of Performance Problems Quicker
With APM tool consolidation done, your teams can solve problems more quickly. Everything is displayed in front of the dashboard. A good APM consolidation tool will also include alerts. These alerts are customized to send information to you if there are bottlenecks or if there is an error that’s reducing the performance of your application.
Your teams can pinpoint an issue immediately without needing to comb through the entirety of the code. You just have to focus on where the problem starts and immediately take action against it.
Using the APM dashboard, the development team can see if the performance is stable or heading towards an issue. The consolidation of the tools makes it so much easy to come up with solutions. So that your end-user is non-the-wiser about the issue and will remain satisfied with what you put out to them.
Cut Out Unnecessary Costs
When you consolidate your APM tools, you have to go through the process of spring cleaning. It helps to know these things:
- How many tools do you use or subscribe to?
- How much do you use them? Are you using only a part of the tool’s features or all of them?
- Which of the tools are adding value, and which are helping create data silos?
Once you have an inventory of the tools you are using, it will help remove the unnecessary ones to your systems. Remember, having too many tools can allow errors to hide behind data silos.
You may be paying for some of the tools; this way, you can remove that extra cost and add value to your systems and processes. The organization is now saving up so you can divert those resources to more meaningful processes of your business.
How You Should Consolidate APM Tools
Here is a 3-step plan to consolidate your APM Tools:
Make a Solid Plan
Before you do anything, you must plan. Here is where you will look for what you need and create an overview of what you want. You want to outline your objectives. What you want to get out of this phase is the following information:
- Your timeline so that you can help everyone in the team to migrate towards the consolidated tool.
- An inventory of tools in current use, how much they help your organization, and their alternatives
- A list of the agreed architecture of what the current environment and the future will look like
- The objectives and goals of this plan are laid out for everyone in the organization and agreed upon by everyone
- What are the KPIs that your company wants to monitor?
- What is everyone’s role in terms of the use of APM?
With this information, you can map out what you need and clearly identify areas of improvement. This will help you get ready for the next phase.
Prepare for Changes
In this phase, essentially, you are trying to
- Understand and map out functional requirements. You can do this by studying different cases. Look for functionalities and see what can be done to support them.
- Have a list of use cases prepared and tools that will support them.
- Have a list of metrics and alerts that are important to support your team.
- Test the use cases against proposed solutions to ensure it is working the way you want them to.
Using this information, you can easily design an execution plan.
Make it Happen
This is the execution stage of your plan. Here’s what you do:
- Implement the consolidation plan, bring in the proposed changes and deploy it to testing, staging, and production phases.
- Training needs to be provided to teams to familiarize everyone with the new methodology.
- Documentation to support the team and to see where possible issues may arise that need to be rethought for improvement.
Once you are done with this phase, remember, that this is a continuous cycle. You will be oscillating between Phase 2 and 3 continuously. However, remember that this is only necessary to improve your systems.
Conclusion
Complex technologies require simplified observability. If you are inundated with performance monitoring tools, hidden issues may affect you in the long run. To counter all this, consolidate.
Consolidating your APM tools can change the way you work. Not only does it streamline your data for better analysis, but it also saves you time and money. It also empowers you to provide the best to your customer through increased productivity and quicker actions. You and your team will be able to prioritize performance and get customer satisfaction all the way.
Get started with your consolidation process with Scout APM.