From delivering products and services to operating industrial processes, today, businesses across all sectors rely heavily on their technological infrastructure. To ensure smooth operations and to meet user expectations, it’s imperative to maintain, optimise and constantly monitor this infrastructure. Part of this process involves application monitoring and in this post, we’ll look at what this is and its benefits for businesses.
What is application monitoring?
At its core, application monitoring is a process that ensures your software applications are operating efficiently and are delivering optimum performance. This involves actively overseeing application processes, understanding and rectifying any performance bottlenecks, and ensuring that every element of an application is functioning as intended. This includes tracking metrics, such as server health, database performance, response times and transaction volumes.
Key benefits of application monitoring
- Enhanced user experience
One of the primary objectives of customer-facing applications is to provide a seamless user experience. If your website takes too long to load, your online store constantly crashes or your SaaS platform isn’t responsive, your business is at risk of losing customers and income. By closely monitoring your application’s performance, you can ensure that your digital platforms remain user-friendly, efficient and reliable. - Proactive problem solving
A key benefit of application monitoring is the ability it gives you to identify and rectify issues before they escalate into serious problems. This proactive approach means that potential disasters can be detected and dealt with early on, reducing downtime and ensuring you are able to offer continuous service to your customers. - Resource optimisation
The efficient allocation of resources is vital for IT-reliant businesses. By undertaking application monitoring, you will be provided with insights into which parts of your application require more resources and which are underutilised. Such knowledge enables businesses to allocate resources wisely, ensuring optimal performance and reduced costs. - Informed decision making
Today’s businesses increasingly make use of data to improve their decision-making and achieve better outcomes. With the vast amount of data collected through application monitoring, you can gain insights into user behaviour, application performance trends and potential areas of improvement. This data can be instrumental in steering your business strategies and helping you make better-informed choices. - Improved development and deployment
A well-monitored application provides feedback that can be invaluable for developers. They can gain insights into application inefficiencies, bugs and areas that are in need of urgent improvement. This information can be utilised to refine the development process and lead to the creation of better products and faster deployment times. - Ensuring compliance and security
With stricter regulations to adhere to and the threat of data breaches all too common, compliance and security are paramount for businesses. Application monitoring can play a critical role in ensuring that your applications maintain compliance with regulations and remain free from vulnerabilities. By monitoring the application environment and spotting irregularities, you can quickly detect potential security threats and take appropriate preventative measures. - Boost business reputation
In a market where consumers are constantly seeking social proof and bad news spreads like wildfire on social media, maintaining a good reputation is crucial. To be viewed as reliable and trustworthy, your business must make sure that its online applications deliver consistent, high-quality services. Ensuring that your applications are running optimally not only benefits your users but also boosts your business reputation – keeping customers loyal and attracting new ones.
Choosing the right tool
If done in-house, the effectiveness of application monitoring will depend on the tools you have chosen for the job. While there are numerous monitoring tools available in the market, ideally, you should use those that are tailored to your specific needs. You should also consider factors like the size of your business, the complexity of your application and your budget.
If your application is hosted by a service provider, the solution could be much easier to put into place. As a provider of bespoke enterprise solutions, application monitoring is just one of many managed services that eukhost is happy to put in place for our customers. We will find the best tool for the job and manage the monitoring on your behalf, reducing the burden on your IT team.
Conclusion
Ensuring the efficiency of your application is vital for businesses that rely on the smooth running of their software. Whether done in-house or through your web hosting provider, application monitoring can be a powerful ally in achieving this, ensuring optimal application performance, improving user experiences, informing decision-making and boosting your business’ reputation.
For more information about application monitoring and our other bespoke, managed solutions, see our Enterprise Hosting page.
