APM or application performance monitoring is simply monitoring the performance of websites or applications. In today’s digital age, almost everything is run on applications. So, it is important to ensure that they are performing highly.
IT professionals ensure that applications meet performance standards by monitoring them using various APM software that are available in the market. Key performance indicators are measurable values that will determine if you are achieving the level of performance that you need in your business or not.
For effective measurement, tracking and assessment of your key performance indicators, you need to set up custom metrics to help you get better insight into your application performance.
So why use custom application metrics? Custom metrics are indispensable in tracking specific performance issues or behavior of your application. So how do you come up with effective custom metrics?
1. Plan well
This initial phase involves choosing your custom metrics which will fill the gap that default metrics cannot fill. For this, you will need to choose only those metrics that will give you detailed information about the performance of your application.
Identify metrics that matter because you do not want to collect and analyze aspects that will not deliver value to your application performance. Find out which aspects of your applications are critical to its health and good performances instead of focusing on metrics that will only give you a sense of false security.
App performance monitoring with custom metrics will reveal many things including how often certain events like transactions happen, the average amount of time that these transactions take and even track concurrent operations.
2. Use specific rates and not totals
Monitoring total counts may look good but only at face value because it is one of the actions that will give you a false sense of security. It takes a lot of work to do so, but they cannot be used to drive action since you are maximizing the wrong things.
Instead of monitoring total metrics, you should focus on monitoring a specific change of rate over a certain period of time. In this way, you will find out if your performance is increasing or decreasing over time or at certain times.
3. Come up with actionable metrics
Metrics that matter should have a clear owner for accountability, be tied to specific performance target, easy to understand and accurate.
Custom metrics that are not actionable or tied to specific and repeatable actions of performance targets are questionable since no action can be taken in response to them.
After you identify a metric, try to map them to actions before creating a simple report mechanism for them. Actionable metrics can also be tied to real people who are very important because metrics are people too.
? Consider visibility and accessibility
The accessibility of your metrics is very important especially to their owners because they need to understand them together with their reports. Put them in a format that is easy to read and digest for easy implementation of the reports. Make them visible by displaying both the successes and failures to all the stakeholders in your organization.
? The metrics should be auditable
If you can validate the accuracy of your custom metrics, then you can comfortably rely on them to drive the performance of your application. The health of your application relies on the reports of the metrics, and this will help only if the measurements are correct.
Monitoring the performance of your application using metrics is very important because you will determine its state and health at any given time. However, this will only happen if correctly implemented with the right creation and collection of metrics.
