Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring Tools

Developers have created many applications over time, and they all agree that the success of their creations depends on how well the applications perform after they are deployed. Therefore, it's crucial to monitor these applications carefully. Addressing performance issues and bugs promptly is essential because if an application doesn't perform well, it can indicate potential failures in a business context as well.

We have outlined ten of the top-performing APM Solutions in this blog. We will thoroughly review their features and see what sets each one of them apart.

Table Of Contents:

• What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?
• Application Performance Monitoring vs. Management
• List of Top APM Tools:
  1. Atatus - Best All in One Observability
  2. Instana - Best for Incident Management
  3. LogicMonitor - Best for Real-time Monitoring
  4. Dynatrace - Best for Debugging Errors
  5. Datadog - Best for Cloud Security
  6. Prometheus - Best Open-source APM Tool
  7. Site24x7 - Best for Security Monitoring
  8. New Relic - Best for Mid-size Companies
  9. SolarWinds SAM - Best for Dependency Mapping
  10. AppDynamics - Best for Small Businesses
• How to select the Best APM Tools?
• Final Thoughts
• Why Atatus stands out among other Application Monitoring Solutions?

What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a set of tools and processes used to monitor and manage the performance, availability, and user experience of software applications. APM is crucial in software development and operations. It involves continuously monitoring and managing application performance to ensure smooth and optimal user experiences.

APM tools track metrics like response times, throughput, error rates, and resource utilization across all application components. They use advanced techniques to pinpoint performance issues and allow real-time monitoring to detect and mitigate problems before they impact users or business operations.

Application Performance Monitoring vs Management

While we focused on Application Performance Monitoring in the previous section, it can be referred to by several related names, including performance monitoring and application monitoring.

Although Application Monitoring and Management are used by many interchangeably, they are distinct for these very reasons;

By employing advanced techniques like code-level instrumentation and distributed tracing, Application Performance Monitoring tools provide granular insights into the behavior of every component within an application. These tools monitor critical metrics such as response times, transaction throughput, and error rates across diverse environments, including web, mobile, and microservices architectures.

Application Performance Management on the other hand, encompasses a broader set of practices and strategies aimed at optimizing the overall performance of applications. While APM includes real-time monitoring as a crucial component, it extends beyond monitoring to include activities such as capacity planning, performance tuning, incident management, and SLA (Service Level Agreement) management.

List of Top APM Tools:

All contents are based on user reviews and solely intent to give you the complete details of each tool.

1. Atatus - Best All in One Observability

Atatus is an advanced Application Performance Monitoring solution designed to provide comprehensive insights into application performance and user experience.

Within APM, they offer:

• Transaction Monitoring: Using histogram and percentiles, identify slow API responses and resolve them promptly.
• Database Monitoring: Obtain a detailed overview of slow SQL queries and analyze individual database performance to address any response time degradation.
• Network Call Performance: Evaluate the performance of time-consuming network calls to external microservices and third-party apps, and identify the most impacted requests.
• HTTP Failures: Assess failure rates using HTTP status codes and identify which requests are affecting end-users the most.
• Transaction Tracking: End-to-end request tracing gives visibility into the flow of requests across the application.
• Error Monitoring: Obtain data on stack trace, request parameters, environment, affected users, host, and more to understand the cause and location of any exceptions.
• Deployment Tracking: With deployment markers, see how your application works pre and post-deployment and get details on slowed down requests, new errors, etc.

And much more.

Atatus not only monitors but ideally manages your entire application environment and correlates the data it collects from different tools to give you a complete picture of all things happening within - be it errors, performance bottlenecks, or user interactions. This holistic approach allows businesses to understand and improve the performance of their applications in a regulated manner.  

Standout Features:

• Atatus is your all-in-one platform for gaining real-time insights into your application’s performance across every layer. Whether it's tracking frontend interactions, looking into backend processes, or monitoring interactions with third-party applications, Atatus ensures comprehensive visibility and control across your entire stack.
• With advanced thread-level distributed tracing, Atatus identifies and resolves issues throughout your application stack and seamlessly correlates these traces with logs, metrics, and database queries. This accelerates root-cause analysis and optimizes code performance, ultimately improving operational efficiency.
• Moreover, Atatus goes beyond standard APM capabilities by enabling monitoring of business-specific KPIs through customizable dashboards and alert systems. This not only enhances application reliability but also elevates user experience by ensuring proactive incident management.
• Atatus features an intuitive user interface that is easy to navigate, even for novice developers. This clarity allows for quick identification of performance issues without unnecessary complexity.
• With Atatus APM, you can get the complete picture of all the transactions occurring in the background, which are potentially slowing down your customer’s UX. It keeps a vigilant eye on your software, tracking its health, performance, and responsiveness in real-time.
• Users have reviewed Atatus to be extremely easy to use while having high functionality.  Also, their outstanding customer support is frequently highlighted in user reviews.

Pricing:

Atatus offers comprehensive application monitoring at $0.07 per host per hour billed monthly. They also offer an all feature included 14 day free trial without registering credit card.

2. Instana - Best for Incident Management

Instana, IBM's application monitoring solution, offers comprehensive visibility across your entire stack. It excels particularly in cloud environments and for monitoring applications, though it may not fully support legacy applications by default.

Instana uses stream processing to immediately collect, and analyze data in real-time, after every application release, deployment and version change thus providing prompt feedback anytime if errors occur.

Standout Features:

• Instana has a good incident reporting coupled with AI powered alerts. As soon as it discovers a service, it starts tracking all related KPIs, like errors, load times, latency, etc.
• Whenever your service goes online or offline, Instana logs these changes and determines whether to send an alert or not. Alerts are accompanied with contextual information and thus helps to easily identify the problem without wasting much time.

Pricing:
Starts at $75 per host per month billed annually. But this is a pack which consists of Infrastructure monitoring, end user monitoring and analytics apart from APM.

3. LogicMonitor - Best for Network Monitoring

Logic Monitor APM makes it easy to monitor metrics via push metrics API and SDK that you can use to send metrics to directly to LogicMonitor without any dependency on a Collector. After ingestion, these push metrics are available in a single platform and you can set up alerting based on thresholds there.

Logic Monitor basically has divided their APM strategy to include metrics, traces and Synthetics. They provide distributed tracing via OpenTelemetry integration where you just configure the endpoint using their API key and get metrics analyzed in real-time.

Standout Features:

LogicMonitor is known for its user-friendly interface and its ability to provide end-to-end visibility into IT infrastructure. Its feature set makes it suitable for IT professionals and organizations of varying sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises, looking to proactively manage and optimize their IT systems.

Pricing:

They have broken down their pricing structure into Pro and enterprise tabs. Pro plan includes monitoring applications across cloud, on-premises and hybrid. While their enterprise package includes AI and ML assistance along with their pro features. For complete details, click here.

4. Dynatrace - Best for Debugging Errors

Dynatrace is also among one of the most popular monitoring tools available today. It offers performance monitoring and application management both in SaaS form and on-premises.

It offers automated discovery and mapping for various web services, multiplatform visibility, end-to-end observability with adept root cause analysis. It also has an AI-assisted feature like Datadog and rest, but sadly, don’t offer improved user experience due to this.

Stand-out Features:
One agent which automatically detects all server components and starts monitoring data across the entire platform as soon as it is installed.

This is the best since it gives a complete outlook of what is happening across the entire application topology and alerts any changes in development and environment in real-time. But just to let you know, it is difficult to understand in the beginning and will need a good amount of data points before you stop seeing false positives.

Pricing:

They offer APM as part of Full-Stack monitoring, which comes at a combined cost of $0.08 per hour for 8 GiB hosts.

Check out this side-by-side comparison blog on Dynatrace vs. Atatus for deeper insights on their individual features.

5. Datadog - Best for Cloud Security

Datadog is one of the most expensive solutions available today, and it really provides best monitoring solutions and can be termed the numero uno in today’s observability world. They simply have expanded to almost all possible niches and give comprehensive monitoring for all your needs.

Datadog's Application Performance Monitoring (APM) offers real-time monitoring and analytics, allowing users to track requests, errors, and latency down to the code level. With features like automatic instrumentation, detailed trace analysis, and integrated dashboards, Datadog APM helps quickly identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.

Its AI-powered alerts and machine learning insights further enhance proactive issue detection and resolution, making it a robust solution for maintaining high application performance and reliability.

Standout Features:

They are very popular for their APM, RUM and Logs monitoring. But they are one of the only observability solutions offering Cloud SIEM and that too with precise metrics.

It also boasts of one of the best interfaces and dashboarding, all the while it being easy to onboard and hassle free.

Pricing:

Starts from $31 per APM host per month, and can go upto $212 for a combined plan including 5 APM hosts, indexed spans, and 900GB extra ingested span.

Take a look at this Datadog vs. Atatus blog to see how they compare against each other.

6. Prometheus - Best Open-source APM Tool

Prometheus is one of those open-source APM tools that offers complete stack monitoring. It excels in collecting and querying high-dimensional time series data, enabling precise performance metrics tracking for applications.

With its powerful query language, PromQL, users can create complex queries to gain deep insights into application behavior. Prometheus's alerting system allows for the timely detection of performance issues, and its integration with Grafana provides rich, customizable dashboards for visualizing metrics.

Although it may require more manual setup compared to some commercial APM solutions, Prometheus’s flexibility and scalability make it a strong choice for monitoring modern cloud-native applications.

Standout Features:

Prometheus's open-source nature offers users significant freedom to customize and self-manage their monitoring setup. Additionally, the Grafana Agent can be used to collect telemetry data, including logs, metrics, and traces, and visualize this data in easy-to-understand charts.

This integration provides a comprehensive and customizable monitoring solution, making it easier to track and analyze application performance.

Pricing:

Prometheus being open-source can be downloaded and used freely. However, hosting and maintaining the necessary infrastructure might get costly. Grafana offers free visualizations for upto 3 users with enterprise plugins.

7. Site24x7 - Best for Security Monitoring

Site24x7 offers SaaS-based application performance, website, and server monitoring on cloud and premises. It provides deep performance insights for applications built with Java, .NET, and PHP, including method-level metrics and detailed call graphs.

They have internal monitoring feature, where an agent installed on one system can monitor internal connectivity to other network devices. Thus even if a connected server goes down, you are alerted typically before the users face it.

Standout Features:
Site24x7’s APM solution is known for its robust security, ensuring that your application data remains protected. It automatically scales resources based on usage patterns, optimizing performance without manual intervention.

Additionally, its impressive integration capabilities with popular communication platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord streamline collaboration and alert management, keeping your team connected and informed.

Pricing:

APM starts at $33.57 per month, billed annually. But it supports multiple users and serves upto 40 basic monitors apart from three complete applications.

8. New Relic - Best for Mid-size Companies

New Relic was one of the pioneers of monitoring and observability solutions. They championed SaaS based APM and are one of the industry leaders today. Along with APM, today they offer around 25+ monitoring solutions.

Standout Features:

New Relic offers excellent error tracking and an additional error inbox which is not available in most of the other solutions listed here. This makes managing errors easy, you can group errors and thus be relieved of unnecessary notifications regarding similar error levels. Also you can set it up such that errors are notified directly to the related slack team.

Pricing:

Pricing is based on data ingested and the number of users, they also offer 100GB free data ingest per month beyond which you will have to pay $0.30 per GB of data ingested additionally.

We have given a complete breakdown on all their features in this Datadog vs New Relic comparison blog. It is a good read if you are looking for in-depth and personal use case review for either of these tools.

Compare New Relic vs. Atatus features in this side-by-side comparison blog.

9. SolarWinds SAM - Best for Dependency Mapping

Solarwinds contains a host of several platforms offering a comprehensive monitoring solution on the whole. But here we are going to focus only on SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor (SAM). It works pretty well with IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS frameworks.

Further, Solarwinds also has another APM solution called AppOptics, which offers on premises, hybrids, and cloud based distributed applications monitoring. It has over 150 plugins and integrations for monitoring servers, host, containers and more. You can implement tracing here in the production stage.

Standout Features:
Solarwinds SAM is great at dependency mapping. With a detailed map to assist, you can increase visibility across the entire stack.

You can also rely on their dashboards that visualize and correlate metrics from APM and Infrastructure, all in a single place.

Pricing:

AppOptics starts at $10 per host per month, sold in a pack of 10 hosts. Application performance monitoring comes as Application Observability for $27.50 per application instance per month billed annually.

10. AppDynamics - Best for Small Businesses

AppDynamics, a leading APM solution from Cisco, offers comprehensive insights into application performance, user experience, and business outcomes. It helps organizations ensure optimal application performance by providing real-time monitoring, automated anomaly detection, and detailed analytics, enabling swift identification and resolution of performance issues.

Standout Features:

AppDynamics offers deep visibility into application performance across complex, distributed environments, tracing each transaction from end to end.

AppDynamics automatically establishes performance baselines and alerts when deviations occur, ensuring proactive issue management.

Pricing:
APM is part of their premium and Enterprise price plans, with premium billed at $33 per month per CPU core and Enterprise at $50 per month, both billed annually. Enterprise plan has Infrastructure, database, and transaction analytics apart from APM.

Comparison Table

How to select the best APM Tool?

Selecting the best APM tool involves not just the cost, but also how well it performs and if it aligns with your business goals.

Some key points you can keep in mind while selecting an APM tool

1. Consider the technology stack (e.g., Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js) and the type of applications (web, mobile, cloud-native) you need to monitor. Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) critical to your operations, such as response times, error rates, and transaction throughput.
2. Look for an APM tool with an intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface. This is crucial for quickly identifying and resolving performance issues. Evaluate how easy it is to install, configure, and start using the tool. Tools that offer automatic instrumentation can save significant setup time.
3. Ensure the tool provides visibility across the entire application stack, from the user interface to the backend services and databases.The tool should offer real-time data collection and analysis to quickly detect and resolve performance issues.
4. Look for tools that offer detailed transaction tracing to understand how requests flow through your application. AI-driven root cause analysis can help you quickly pinpoint and resolve issues.Intelligent alerting mechanisms and anomaly detection features are essential for proactive performance management.
5. The tool should be able to scale with your application and handle large volumes of data without significantly impacting application performance.
6. Ensure the tool integrates well with your existing tools and platforms, such as CI/CD pipelines, logging systems, and collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
7. The ability to create custom dashboards to visualize key metrics is essential for monitoring and reporting.
8. Understand the pricing structure (e.g., per host, per transaction, per CPU core) and ensure it aligns with your budget and scalability needs.

Take advantage of free trials or demo versions to test the tool in your environment and see how well it meets your needs.

Final Thoughts

Iterating the importance of APM and APM tools, we discussed the top ten most promising monitoring solutions in this blog. With increasing complexity in building apps and the increase of distributed architecture, opting for an APM solution doesn't seem like a bad deal.

Many SaaS solutions today offer 10 to 30 day free trial so that you can get your hands on it and see what fits you best, both technically and financially. Also, choosing an open-source solution has its own advantages in terms of customizability and scalability.

Why Atatus stands out among other Application Monitoring Solutions?

When it comes to choosing a monitoring solution, Atatus stands out as a top choice for several compelling reasons. It offers a cost-effective solution, providing comprehensive features at a fraction of the cost of other alternatives, making it ideal for startups, SMBs, all the way till enterprise-level solutions.

The setup process is straightforward and quick, thanks to its user-friendly interface, allowing you to start monitoring your applications and infrastructure within minutes. Atatus also ensures seamless integration with a wide range of third-party services and tools, minimizing compatibility issues and fitting smoothly into your existing tech stack.

Additionally, its intuitive interface and comprehensive documentation provide a gentle learning curve, enabling users to maximize the platform's potential without extensive training. With a 14-day free trial and no need for credit card registration, Atatus makes it easy to get started and explore its powerful features.