Top 25 Application Monitoring Tools List

We review the top 25 application monitoring tools. Who will be the best?

Comparison last updated: August 2018

Businesses today must guarantee their applications, from internal business-critical application to mobile apps, are always available for customers and end-users.  DevOps and IT team members must collaborate now more than they ever have before.  Any deficiency in your site or application, will result in disappointed users, negative perception, and potential revenue loss.

APM, or Application Performance Monitoring, is essentially the process of ensuring that an application is performing in an expected way.  Gartner defines it as multiple software/hardware monitoring elements that aid in meeting three functional areas:

• Digital Experience Monitoring
• Application Discovery, Diagnostics, and Tracing
• AI aimed at IT Operations (or AIOps) involving Applications

Application Monitoring Tools: Choosing The Best One

Choosing the right APM tool means finding one that is capable of seamlessly integrating with your current environment and provides a comprehensive solution – web application monitoring, load and stress tests, performance insights, and critical infrastructure testing – all in an easy-to-use interface.  Additional items to consider when selecting an APM provider:

• Focus on the user perspective
• Monitoring from multiple locations
• Application trend analysis
• Flexible, custom alerts
• Real-time reporting

Dotcom-Monitor simulates a user’s browser interactions with a website to monitor website applications and online transactions, such as shopping carts, log-in processes, and banking applications.  These actions are recorded using the EveryStep Scripting Tool, allowing you to record and playback virtually any set of web transaction steps for monitoring – mouse clicks, hovering, page navigation, and typing text.

The recorded script can be re-played by each monitoring agent, validating the functionality, content, and visual layout of web pages and applications.  Dotcom-Monitor is capable of monitoring web applications built with a wide variety of complex technologies.

• Real browser emulation
• Global monitoring locations
• Behind the firewall monitoring
• Real-time dashboards
• Script recording tool
• Custom alerting system
• 3rd Party Integrations
• 24/7 Support

With New Relic APM, users are given a current view of their applications. The platform allows IT teams to target precise issues to get detailed performance reports.

• Service Level Agreement reports
• Identify slow applications
• Customized reports
• Root-cause diagnosis
• Trace individual transactions

Retrace gives Development and Operations teams instant analysis into the current behavior of the applications in their environment, helping make customer service better and app performance.

• Identify and isolate issues
• Debugging
• Log management
• Application/Service behavior and performance analysis

Utilizing a single interface and intelligent learning, Datadog APM gives awareness into the performance and health of applications, alerting when issues arise.

• Supports many third-party platforms
• Bug tracking
• Application performance analysis
• Customizable notifications and alerts

LogicMonitor provides automated monitoring of application availability, user experience, and performance metrics of your entire IT infrastructure.

• Automatically detects and configures devices
• Customizable dashboards
• Test site from outside network
• Simulate multi-step operations
• Escalation chains

Deployable as SaaS or on-premises, Dynatrace provides full-stack monitoring in single platform, allowing teams to spot and correct issues instantly.

• Single pane of glass
• Scalable with environment
• Analyze end-user actions
• Root cause analysis

A platform for monitoring application efficiency, AppDynamics APM proactively discovers, maps, and visualizes your customer journeys through each application service and infrastructure dependency, helping identify issues quickly for development and deployment.

• Trace individual transactions
• Flow Maps
• Diagnostic tools
• Full visibility into user journey
• Baseline manager
• Performance indicators

Bugsnag assists Engineering and Development teams with monitoring and improving the stability and performance of their applications.

• Prioritize error fixes
• Support for over 50 platforms
• Diagnose specific issues
• Retrace end-user steps

nGeniusOne from NetScout is a continuous monitoring platform that gives enterprises a view into the health, availability, and performance of their applications.

• Single, unified view
• Real-time metrics
• Full stack visibility
• Identify bottlenecks

Instrumental Application Monitoring provides of your entire stack, so IT teams can quickly assess issues within specific applications.

• Single interface
• Support for multiple frameworks (Ruby, .Net, Java, etc.)
• Set up text and SMS alerts
• Compare and analyze historical data

Offering unified cloud monitoring for DevOps and IT teams, Site24x7 monitors real user experiences from desktop and mobile devices, helping teams to fine-tune applications, servers, and network infrastructure.

• Website performance monitoring
• Remote desktop control
• Server monitoring
• RUM
• Monitor from over 90 locations

OP5 Monitor is a server monitoring solution that delivers a single view into an organization’s entire infrastructure, helping to resolve issues quicker and enhancing the customer experience.

• Assists in planning for network capacity
• Intuitive reporting
• Scalability
• Customizable reports

Monitor helps system administrators and DevOps teams monitor the complexity of their enterprise infrastructure, no matter the environment.

• Real-time monitoring
• Modify existing configuration
• Integrate with existing platforms (Slack, PagerDuty, etc.)
• Easy Configuration and Use
• Opspack marketplace

Comprising of three parts – The SevOne Data Insight, SevOne Data Engine, and SevOne Data Bus – the SevOne Data Platform offers the capability to gather and review, real-time data to identify issues across your environment.

• Integrate platform with API’s
• Set up custom reports
• Performance alerts
• Customizable dashboards

Comprised of four components (AppInternals, Aternity, AppResponse, and Portal) Riverbed SteelCentral provides monitoring for every type of application.  IT teams can monitor and trace end-user transactions to improve efficiencies.

• Automated End User Experience Analytics (EUEM)
• AI and data analytics
• Analyze network packets, web transactions, and databases
• Unified communications analysis

ManageEngine AM offers monitoring help for over 100 application for on-premises, virtual, or cloud environments, helping businesses protect their critical applications.

• ADDM
• Manage Service Level Agreements
• REST APIs
• Customizable view into IT resources
• Detect inconsistencies
• Multiple-user access

SCOM focuses on the performance and uptime of applications, in addition to monitoring for private/public cloud, datacenter environments, and heterogeneous environments (Linux, Hyper-V, and VMware).

• On-premises/cloud workload management
• Push updates across devices
• Datacenter task automation
• Monitor capacity and system health across applications
• Protect applications, cloud deployments, and clients

Raygun provides error, crash, and performance monitoring solutions for DevOps and software development teams, giving a full view into how end-users see and experience your software or applications.

• Advanced filters and search
• Data comparison
• Country level geo data
• Unlimited team members
• Custom timings
• Live session activity feed

JENNIFER provides insight into RUM through intuitive dashboards, allowing IT to easily detect and troubleshooting errors.

• Analyze and monitor performance in real-time
• Support for cloud environments
• Create performance reports
• Monitor large quantities of transactions

CA APM can identify, monitor, and resolve issues over many environments and mobile applications. It’s built to handle the complexity of today’s applications, proactively spotting, prioritizing, and fixing applications problems before they impact the customer.

• Predict issues with analytics
• Root cause diagnosis
• Easily locate performance problem
• Insight into your apps
• Full transaction diagnostics

AutoPilot from Nastel monitors the status and health of your applications in real-time, allowing IT teams to detect and fix problems before users do.

• Broad software support (Java, .NET, z/OS, IBM MQ products, DataPower, TIBCO, and Solace)
• Integration with SNMP, Twitter, RSS, dashboards, and event consoles
• Easy-to-use tools detect and correct MQ-based problems
• User-defined rules, alerts, policies and KPIs
• Intuitive, easily defined dashboards
• Web operations and UNIX-based console support

AlertSite from SmartBear is a synthetic monitoring SaaS platform for websites, applications, and APIs that allows users to proactively monitor from a 340+ points around the world.

• Global and private monitoring options
• Reporting and analytics
• Automate and configure with API’s
• Real-time alerts
• Test-on-demand

AppEnsure allows teams to proactively manage end-user experiences, correlating actual end-user response time experience with the application-delivery infrastructure performance.

• Provides end-user centric experience expressed in response times
• Auto maps entire service delivery topology
• Measures response time of every user of every application
• Baselines response time thresholds
• Diagnostics

Monitor, optimize, manage and fix performance issues across your virtual environment and databases.  Using a single GUI, Foglight integrates with your current environment.

• Full visibility across your infrastructure.
• Report on historical data
• Adjust and configure capacity for virtual and physical servers.
• Ensure optimal database performance

TrueSight APM from BMC is a SaaS platform composed of three separate tools – TrueSight AppVisibility, TrueSight Capacity, and TrueSight Operations– helping to manage the full user experience across your mission-critical applications.

• Easy and quick deployment
• Monitor specific apps
• Apply AI capabilities for monitoring and error detecting
• Customizable, dynamic notifications

Application Monitoring Tools Reviewed – Conclusion

Each solution must be evaluated to ensure it meets your budget and criteria. However, the main goal is to find a tool focused on analyzing, detecting, and increasing performance of end-user experience of your application.

Dotcom-Monitor allows you to proactively monitor a critical path typically taken by end-users – validating the content, functionality, and visual layout of web pages and applications – using a global network of monitoring locations.  Dotcom-Monitor works with the most complex application technologies, such as HTML5, AJAX, Flex, Flash, Java, QuickTime, Ruby, Silverlight, Windows Media Player and more.