ROI Benefits of APM Tools

Software applications have become crucial for business growth and success in today's world.

However, as businesses become increasingly competitive, the necessity to provide top-notch software applications is also increasing. Additionally, as organisations gravitate towards developing extensive, feature-rich applications, they are witnessing an increase in software complexity – that can often cause things to get out of hand very quickly. As a result, it is getting harder for businesses to manage such complex software applications. 

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solves this problem by providing a helpful bird's eye view of your application and the status of the operations taking place within. APM tools benefit businesses on several fronts. This post will focus on all of the financial benefits.

What are the ROI financial benefits of APM tools?

What is APM?

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is the process of evaluating, analyzing, and monitoring the performance of software applications. APM provides a clear picture of an application's overall status and health, including essential quantifiable information such as request, response rates, memory allocation, throughput, error rates, user satisfaction metrics, and more.

This information gathered by APM tools helps organizations in:

• Understanding, debugging, and troubleshooting issues before the end user notices anything. 
• Discovering performance bottlenecks causing significant slowdowns.
• Identify where the application consumes excessive resources to optimize the code or upscale compute accordingly.
• Getting real-time alerts through communication platforms of your choice and more.
• Getting access to actionable insights about boosting performance

To learn more about APMs, check out the What is APM post on our blog.

Financial Benefits to the Business

So far, we have discussed the ability of APM tools to analyze software performance. You might still wonder how this monitoring and analysis translates to return on investment (ROI) when subscribing to an APM service.

Here are some of the significant financial benefits of APM tools:

1. Enhanced developer productivity
2. Reduced operational and compute costs
3. Better user satisfaction and experience
4. Increased sales and revenue, reduced customer churn

Let’s dive into each of these, one by one.

Enhanced Developer Productivity

Debugging is difficult. In the 1974 classic, the Element of programming style, Kernighan and Plauger wrote, “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place.”

Developers often spend more time debugging issues than fixing them (or building new features). In fact, debugging, testing, and verification are estimated to take up around 50-75% of a business's total software development budget.

This is where APM tools come in to save the day. With metrics that provide a comprehensive picture of your application’s operations, developers can directly jump to problematic requests and endpoints taking the most time. This has multiple obvious benefits:

• It saves the organization a lot of time.
• Increases efficiency of troubleshooting (crucial issues wouldn’t go unattended)
• It saves developers a lot of energy otherwise spent on menial bottleneck hunting.
• Allows them to focus on more essential parts of an application and build new stuff.
• Increases overall team morale.

Increased Sales & Revenue

Nobody likes a buggy application. You give your users one sluggish or buggy experience, and they’ll very soon consider alternatives to your application. The stakes are high, and the margin of error is too low.

By making the process of identifying and debugging bottlenecks and issues quick and effortless, organizations ensure that end users are shipped a fast, smooth, error-free application experience. And all of this translates directly into increased sales, more (and happier) users, and, therefore, increased revenue.

This allows businesses to gain the trust of their customers and build credibility that makes a company successful in the long run.

Reduced Operational Costs

Without enough context about what is slowing down your application, it might be tempting to consider upscaling compute resources to improve performance.

Even though that option might solve the problem temporarily in some cases, this would incur an unnecessary, avoidable additional operational cost. Furthermore, the issue might resurface soon – because you didn’t appropriately address the concern in the first place.

APM tools address such issues by providing more clarity about the state of affairs of your application. Even a quick peek at your dashboard could help you identify the root cause of slowdowns. You might realize that the issue was a memory leak filling up your RAM while you were wondering whether your resources were insufficient. 

Regular insights about performance related to N+1 queries, memory bloat, and slow queries can shed light on the parts of your application most responsible for reduced performance. As a result, no more compute upscaling expenses unless absolutely necessary. Plus, it reduces time spent on debugging; time is money.

Better Customer Satisfaction and End User Experience

Customer experience is paramount. The success of most businesses relies on their customers' experience with their products.

It is next to impossible to retain customers with a bad user experience in this competitive business world (unless you are the only company offering a service, in which case, some other company might come in and offer a much better deal).

On the other hand, if a product has a community of satisfied users, the community itself will do the marketing. Referrals and word of mouth go a long way. For example, if two businesses offer the same product, but a friend explicitly recommends one over the other, we would most likely choose that one because of its credibility and trust. 

To achieve maximum customer satisfaction and end-user experience, the developer’s team needs to act fast if there’s an issue with a customer’s usage and fix it correctly. The application also should function seamlessly during peak hours and always be available. This is how customers develop trust in a product and its services. 

Get Started with Scout APM

Diagnosing and fixing bugs and bottlenecks is a hassle without an APM tool.

APM tools aren’t always cheap, but neither are engineers who can monitor your application 24x7 and alert the team about issues across the whole setup in seconds. Therefore, it’s critical to invest in APM tools that:

• allow teams to focus more on building and scaling production-level services instead of debugging issues
• and provide a significant ROI through several financial benefits

Check out our Why Scout page to learn more about why Scout is the best fit for your organization’s APM needs. 

And if you are already on board, get started with a 14-day free trial (no credit card needed!).