Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is the practice of monitoring and managing the performance and availability of software applications. APM tools collect data on the behavior of applications, alert and collect data on the sources of any issues, analyze data to assess the impact on business, and adapt the application to address similar problems before they impact the end-user experience. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex issues that can negatively affect an applications performance. The focus of APM is on specific metrics and measurements, while application performance management is the wider discipline of developing and managing an application performance strategy. APM platforms provide a single integrated platform using AI and automation to deliver a precise, context-aware analysis of the application environment.

Some of the benefits of APM include ensuring system availability, optimizing service performance and response times, improving user experiences, and maintaining expected service levels. APM tools allow for real-time monitoring and root cause analysis of performance issues, which can help maintain application uptime. APM solutions can optimize IT operations by alerting IT teams about potential obstacles to business growth and profitability, and ultimately providing end-users with a flawless user experience.

APM tracks various components of two types of performance metrics: the performance that users experience, including load and response times during peak usage, and the capacity of computational resources. Some of the most critical application monitoring metrics include CPU usage, memory demands, web performance monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring.

Two challenges for implementing APM are that it can be difficult to instrument an application to monitor application performance, especially among components of an application, and applications can be virtualized, which increases the variability of the measurements. To alleviate the first problem, application service management (ASM) provides an application-centric approach, where business service performance visibility is a key objective. The second aspect present in distributed, virtual, and cloud-based applications poses a unique challenge for application performance monitoring because most of the key system components are no longer hosted on a single machine.