There are many different classes of web performance tools, from synthetic monitoring to application performance monitoring (APM), to real user monitoring (RUM), and more. These different classes exist because each has its own strengths and weaknesses. When evaluating open-source or enterprise-grade synthetic monitoring tools, you want to look for capabilities that maximize its strengths.
Nobody actually cares about the network. Provocative words coming from a network visibility company, you might be thinking. However, consider what you’re doing right now. You’re reading a blog on a website, maybe clicking around other tabs, possibly streaming some music, and likely keeping an eye on your work chat. These are all applications, and that’s what we all truly care about, not the plumbing that delivers them.
For DevOps teams, delivering quality software has long required reconciling a major tension: In a perfect world, you’d catch every issue in each new release of your application before you deployed the release into production. But in the real world, doing so is tricky, not least because it’s hard to collect data about application performance before the application is actually deployed.
In the present age of cloud-native everything, it can be easy to forget that some applications still run on-premises. But they do and managing the performance of on-premises apps is just as important as monitoring those that run in the cloud. With that reality in mind, here’s a primer on how to approach on-premises application performance monitoring as part of a broader cloud-native performance optimization strategy.
