Application monitoring describes a category of tools, techniques, and software applications used to ensure that technical teams—such as DevOps teams—are aware of key metrics and events related to a wide range of areas, including application health, performance, network traffic, resource utilization, and security.
Application monitoring complements application delivery by enabling these teams to predict and prevent potential problems, identify and resolve issues in real time, and improve decision-making.
Application monitoring goes beyond merely checking if an application is active or inactive. It focuses on maintaining optimal performance by helping the user to quickly identify any abnormalities, security breaches, or performance hiccups. The goal of application monitoring is to help the user to maintain nearly perfect delivery of results, such as delivering a near-perfect user experience, which has become synonymous with business success.
Application monitoring is important and covers a wide range of functionality. As a result, software with these capabilities has a wide range of names, including application monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), and application performance management (also APM) software. We use application monitoring in this article to describe core capabilities that apply across these categories.
How does application monitoring work?
Application monitoring gathers telemetry—or metrics and event records generated by an application and the environment it’s running in. For example, tools such as log analysis and cloud monitoring services generate telemetry that helps detect operational bottlenecks, such as CPU spikes or memory leaks, which can lead to resource depletion and unexpected downtime.
Application monitoring then provides this information in a variety of ways to technical team members. For instance, application monitoring capabilities may provide information in a graphical user interface (GUI), such as in graph format; displayed as text on screen, via a command-line interface (CLI); or as text delivered in response to an application query sent via an application programming interface (API).
Application monitoring also aggregates information and compares information from multiple sources, thus adding value when compared to the user simply inspecting various metrics and events directly. For example, application monitoring makes it easy for the user to set alerts when a specific result, trend, or combination of these is detected. It also streamlines the process of managing alerts as a group, a task which a user would have difficulty doing on their own.
Why is application monitoring useful?
Application monitoring provides a great deal of value to technical teams, such that it is considered indispensable in delivering applications. Most technical teams use multiple and overlapping application monitoring tools, techniques, and software applications in their work.
The usefulness of application monitoring can be seen by examining four major—and usually overlapping—ways in which application monitoring tools are used:
Performance monitoring involves tracking metrics such as response times, throughput, resource utilization, and latency. It’s used to assess key performance indicators (KPIs) of an application, including performance, availability, resource usage, and efficiency.
Availability/uptime monitoring focuses on ensuring high availability by monitoring each component of the application stack individually, such as proxies, web servers, databases, and storage systems. This can also include simulating user interactions, such as user log-in or access to database-driven content.
Security monitoring helps users to effectively identify and mitigate potential security threats and risks within an application by closely observing application behavior, user activities, and network traffic in real time.
Error monitoring detects and reports glitches, errors, or exceptions within an application. Error monitoring capabilities also provide detailed error logs and stack traces, to support effective debugging and troubleshooting.
Application monitoring is critical to meeting organizational goals in important areas such as cost reduction, user experience, revenue generation, and enhancing security, as well as in broader goals such as scalability planning and reputation management.
Does HAProxy offer application monitoring?
HAProxy products support a wide range of application monitoring features, while also providing telemetry to other application monitoring tools.
First, the HAProxy Stats Page provides a dashboard that serves as a GUI for the operational state of services proxied by HAProxy. Second, HAProxy Data Plane API allows users to configure load balancing and fetch real-time stats via API calls. Third, HAProxy and HAProxy Enterprise collect a vast expanse of application health data, which users can export to external application monitoring solutions compatible with Prometheus, the most-used open source standard for application monitoring data.
Most importantly, HAProxy Fusion Control Plane provides advanced application observability, monitoring, and management to users of HAProxy Enterprise, while easily integrating with other monitoring frameworks. To learn more about application monitoring in HAProxy, check out our alerts and errors documentation.
