Web Performance Monitoring (WPM) is an external and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is an internal monitoring process for web applications. These two services can be used independently to monitor the performance of individual (external or internal) components, but integration of these two processes provides the ultimate performance monitoring service for any web application.
Web performance monitoring (WPM) solution helps to monitor the business transactions initiated by the real users (or synthetic users) from browsers across different geographies. It basically monitors the end users experience during transactions. On the other hand, application performance monitoring (APM) solution monitors the inner working of the application all the way down to the code level.
So the integration between these two solutions (WPM and APM) correlate the inner view with the outer view and that is the significant benefit.
Now, let us have a look at the specific advantages of this integration.
- It provides a comprehensive and consolidated performance view to support the business process more effectively and hence protect the revenue and brand value.
- The combined integrated view helps to isolate the root cause quickly in both pre-production and production environment.
- It helps to trace the complex and distributed transactions quickly, as the user behaviours (along with screen shots) are also captured during the process.
- It provides an easy visibility to the following areas during user transaction.
- Memory leaks
- Code issues
- Slow execution of database queries
- Infrastructure issues
- Slow response from third party components/web services
- End user experiences
- It provides a combined real time visibility to the performance. The real time visibility covers both the user experience and the code level execution.
- Detailed drill down information helps to resolve the performance issues quickly. Browser snapshots identify the exact user experience along with the root cause.
- It provides a single dashboard view of the code analysis and the end user experience. It basically correlates the external browser metrics with the internal application metrics in a single dashboard.
Till now we have discussed different aspects of web performance monitoring and application performance monitoring. We have also talked about the integration part and the benefits. Different testing tools provide an integrated platform, consists of web performance monitoring solution and application performance monitoring platform. The integrated platform provides a comprehensive view, consists of ‘end user experience’ and ‘inner working of the application’. These tools also offer the solution as a SaaS model or custom on-premise application.
