Applications are at the heart of a SaaS business’s success, in the digital world; especially, as end-users rely on applications to fulfill their daily needs and goals. Naturally, end-users expect applications to perform flawlessly, every time. Therefore, to maintain a top-notch user experience and keep customers happy, companies need to ensure the optimal health and performance of their applications. How do they achieve that? In three simple words: Application Monitoring Software.
Dealing with increasing application complexity
Today’s applications are light years ahead, as compared to the ones we used a few years ago; that’s in terms of capacity, quality and reliability — to say the least. But, this comes with a price. Modern applications have become very complex; not just to develop, but also to maintain and update. And that’s because they’re more sophisticated than ever. As a result, their health and performance are constantly on thin ice.
Nonetheless, as mentioned, delivering a flawless end-user experience is critical. For this to happen, SaaS companies first need to understand the factors that may negatively affect application health and performance. Application Monitoring Software comes in, to shed light on this. By leveraging a full-stack monitoring tool, companies are finally able to sidestep issues, such as slow-downs, and ensure optimal application performance.
What does Application Monitoring Software do exactly?
In essence, Application Monitoring Software allows admins to track and monitor applications to promptly identify and resolve issues that arise. Such a tool can provide health and performance metrics for applications; along with a plethora of insights and analytics. These metrics, in turn, form a baseline that helps admins quickly detect when applications — and their components — deviate from their standard values; and act towards remediating these issues, before they reach end-users. It’s with this ability — to identify and fix issues on the spot — that SaaS companies are able to provide a seamless user experience.
How can Application Monitoring Software make your services reliable and robust?
Now that we briefly covered what Application Monitoring Software does, let’s see how such a tool can help make Cloud services reliable and take them to the next level.
1. Real-time, full-stack monitoring
Time is of the essence, when user experience is on the line. In fact, even seconds matter — there is no room for error. With solid Application Monitoring Software, IT teams can track reliability and performance indicators in real time; and, across the entire technology stack, of course. Thus, promptly detecting potential problems with an application and repairing them, immediately.
2. High-level visibility
Using an application monitoring tool, businesses can consolidate operational visibility for all Cloud services and applications, in a centralized dashboard. This helps their teams to manage services and applications properly, by identifying choke points and performance bottlenecks; both short- and long-term.
3. Effective troubleshooting
When services are slowing down, the last thing companies want is to spend an unnecessary amount of time searching for the issue. Proactivity is key here. Making good use of machine learning and advanced analytics, Application Monitoring Software helps teams quickly investigate the issue.
This means that they can monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot applications faster than ever. How? By immediately acting on alerts, collecting logs, analyzing metrics and gaining insights for further improvements and new analytics.
4. Efficient SLAs tracking
SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are the backbone of IT management. They’re the foundation upon which businesses can set expectations for their applications and services; simply because they outline the system’s reliability, in great detail. Using Application Monitoring Software, helps ensure that SLOs (Service Level Objectives) are met; and, that the SLAs between a service provider and their customers are not breached.
Why you need an Application Monitoring Tool, today
As we’ve learned, Application Monitoring Software is an essential tool in a SaaS business’s arsenal. That’s how teams can keep applications performing at optimal levels and increase their scalability; keeping up with the pace of emerging technological advances. This is important because applications are the face of a business; and, mind you, customer expectations only get higher, with time.
Truth be told, this ‘unforgiving’ demand from the end-users’ standpoint has put SaaS businesses under great pressure to keep their applications available and reliable. So much so, that the risk of losing customers and revenue — and even potentially, damaging their brand’s reputation — increases expediently, with time.
Thankfully, Application Monitoring Software comes into play, to save the day. Investing in a comprehensive monitoring tool, can go a long way towards reducing MTTR and boosting the reliability of their services. It’s not hard to understand how, bearing in mind everything we’ve discussed here. At the end of the day, such a tool is not only important, but an absolute necessity for the viability and scalability of any SaaS business in the digital reality.