IT infrastructure, like many other facets of business, is subject to the continuous change that modernity brings. Within the realms of database monitoring (DB) and application performance monitoring (APM), the present shifts in IT infrastructure may drive crucial enhancements in operational resilience, putting your business at the forefront of application system performance.
Experts from Quest Software joined DBTA’s webinar, APM and DB Monitoring: Necessity or Overkill?, to offer key insights regarding the APM and DB monitoring spheres, illustrating how IT strategies can be reshaped to best accommodate the modern application and its business.
Mark Gowdy, SW sales engineering, senior director at Quest Software, explained that APM “allows organizations to understand how users interact with their applications and assess the overall user experience.” This delivers visibility into application performance as workloads change, as well as proactively surfaces problems that may arise, Gowdy added.
While APM tools help improve the user experience, increase productivity, drive cost savings, accelerate app deployment, and more, application complexity has altered the playing field. Moving from monolithic to microservices architectures, “the number of things you have to do to make sure your application is stable increased,” said Gowdy. The multi-tier, microservices architectures of today are infinitely more complex than their monolithic predecessors, which inevitably impacts APM.
While undoubtedly more complex, APM has also increased in necessity as microservices architectures become the norm—evidenced by a Gartner report that found that 74% of organizations are currently using microservices architectures. Many enterprises may turn to the abundant point solutions for their APM needs, yet these tools provide a very limited view of overall application performance, ultimately creating silos and increasing inefficiency, according to Gowdy.
Amit Parikh, SW sales engineer architect at Quest Software, explained that database observability is the answer to the APM complexity problem. Data is at the core of software applications, and by prioritizing the enhancement of the data infrastructure, enterprises can see significant success in their application performance.
“In the ever-evolving software development landscape, your choices can significantly impact your success,” said Parikh. “It’s not just about creating software; it’s about harnessing that data to drive innovation, and then you can meet user expectations head-on.”
This starts when selecting the database; “as software becomes increasingly data-intensive, the role of the database becomes pivotal. A sluggish, costly, or even unreliable database isn’t merely a technical issue; it poses significant challenges for development teams,” noted Parikh. A slow database creates a poor user experience, while expensive databases divert resources from critical development efforts.
Understanding that the database is the heart of the application is crucial, as slow queries or database outages can bring the application to a halt—regardless of how well other components perform. Database performance, reliability, and security each dictate how well the application succeeds, according to Parikh.
Combining the points of both Gowdy and Parikh, Bharath Vasudevan, head of go-to-market at Quest Software, explained that organizations are going to have to find room for both APM and DB monitoring. While an APM tool can help enterprise teams better understand app performance in real time, identify slowdowns and anomalies, improve incident response times, and grant end-to-end visibility, DB monitoring is an additional layer of defense that doesn’t focus solely on remediation, but rather, tackles application issues at its root.
Vasudevan emphasized that APM and DB monitoring should not be a question of either/or, but instead, both/and. The mere cost of an outage is reason enough to implement both tools, as, with just an APM tool in place, outages, revenue impact, and total additional cost are significantly higher than when used in conjunction with DB monitoring.
For the full, in-depth webinar, featuring granular explanations, examples, and a Q&A, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.