All you should know about performance monitoring

Is your system reliable? This question is frequently asked, when someone is analyzing your product or service. Reliability is an important metric to measure/compare the systems available in the market. In order to maintain reliability and to ensure that operations are running smoothly and efficiently, various types of performance monitoring come into picture. 

This is the reason why companies have a special budget for monitoring each and every component of their system. Let’s try to get deeper into this supreme topic of performance monitoring.

What is performance monitoring?

Performance monitoring is keeping a watch on how the system or processes are performing. We gather critical data to uncover hidden issues early on and address them promptly before they snowball into major disruptions. By keeping an eye on how the system's resources, applications, and users are performing over time, we can get a clear picture of how well the whole system is working. This data can be used to: 

• Identify performance bottlenecks and slowdowns: Performance monitoring can pinpoint areas where the system is underperforming, allowing for targeted optimization efforts.
• Detect and diagnose errors and exceptions: By tracking error logs and exception events, performance monitoring can help identify and diagnose issues that may be causing disruptions or impacting user experiences.
• Predict and prevent potential failures: This is all about staying ahead of any thing that can go wrong, with the help of data and identifying patterns.
• Optimize resource utilization: Make the most of your resources: Performance monitoring helps us find where we're using resources inefficiently and tweak things so the whole system works better.

There are many performance monitoring tools in the market, which you can consider for your web and mobile app. Zipy, Datadog, New Relic, and Pingdom are some popular ones. 

Why is monitoring performance important?

With the growing digital world, it is becoming important to make our system very responsive and fast enough to serve the purpose. Slow and unresponsive systems unfortunately lead to user dissatisfaction and churning of customers. 

Starting from monitoring of end user response time to the system’s availability with the growing system’s load, performance monitoring allows for better decision making in a shorter span of time.

If we analyze how an app makes use of  resources like CPU, memory, and storage, we can work on making it run better and use less money. This is one of the main functions of performance monitoring.

Performance monitoring is especially important during busy traffic periods, this helps developers ensure that your app can handle the extra traffic smoothly.

A performance monitoring tool like Zipy provides real-time insights about performance issues and errors across your digital products, enabling businesses to take corrective action faster.

Performance monitoring tools routinely do health checks of the system, which can help in taking preventive measures to avoid system’s downtime. 

Key metrics in performance monitoring

• Response time: How long it takes for an application to answer a client's request is response time. Apps need to respond quickly, especially when dealing with frameworks that deal with customers directly. For us one second delay might not look alarming but it can impact drastically in conversion rate reduction.
• Throughput: Throughput estimates the number of exchanges or tasks a framework can handle in a given time. Surveying the limit of a system is frequently used.
• Error rate: This measurement tracks the number of mistakes or failures inside a system. A high blunder rate can show issues that should be tended to.
• Uptime: This measurement estimates the amount of time an application is functional and accessible for use. It's not unexpected to communicate this as a percentage, with higher values being better.
• Resource utilization: Resource utilization metrics track the usage of various system resources, including CPU, memory, and disk space. Monitoring resource utilization helps identify bottlenecks and capacity issues.
• Latency: Idleness estimates the deferred information transmission or handling. Low inactivity is basic for constant applications, monetary frameworks, and internet gaming.
• User satisfaction: Get-together client criticism and fulfillment scores can give important bits of knowledge into the client experience and assist with distinguishing regions for development.
• Page load time: In web applications, page load time is basic for client experience. Slow stacking times can bring about high skip rates and client disappointment.
• Network traffic: Checking network traffic can assist you with distinguishing examples and potential security issues. Associations must distinguish uncommon or dubious organizational action.
• Churn rate: In membership-based administrations, the agitate rate estimates the rate at which clients drop their memberships. A high beat rate might flag client disappointment.
• Cost per transaction: This measurement is fundamental for monetary examination. It estimates the expense related to every exchange or activity, assisting with overseeing costs.
• Compliance metrics: In managed ventures, consistency measurements guarantee that a framework or cycle complies with pertinent regulations and guidelines.
• Security measurements: These measurements track security episodes, weaknesses, and the viability of safety efforts set up.
• Application performance index (API): Programming interface measures are utilized for surveying the presentation of APIs, including reaction time, mistake rates, and throughput.
• Service level agreements (SLA) metrics: For specialist co-ops, SLA measurements measure the presentation against the settled upon administration levels, which are met to guarantee legally binding commitments.

Performance monitoring methods and approaches

Real-time performance monitoring, dashboards and metrics

This method involves continuous tracking of performance metrics, providing immediate insights of system behavior. You can checkout Zipy’s performance monitoring dashboard which gives immense insight to get a deeper understanding.

Alerts and notifications systems

You should apply alerts and notifications logically wherever the metrics  crosses the threshold values, which can alarm people if there are any problems. This will also avoid manual monitoring.

Components of performance monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM):

Application performance monitoring majorly helps in ensuring the services should be running effectively, smoothly, and with minimal downtime. Application performance monitoring offers several benefits.

• Customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is the common end goal of every product. APM tools are ways to locate where exactly the issues occur across an application, this will allow us to quickly diagnose the issue and address it. With tools like Zipy, you do not have to even reproduce the issue, Just replay it.
• Early detection: The early diagnosis keeps downtime to a minimum and can help in getting better solutions than workarounds as well as patching.
• Reduced operating costs: APM tools will determine the resource and infrastructure utilization, which will help in analyzing over as well as under utilized resources.
• Product development: The live metrics really helps in product development where we want to do some back of the envelope calculations, this will also enable the development team to get the actionable insights for better prioritization.

API/network performance monitoring:

API monitoring focuses on the performance and functionality of Application Programming Interfaces. Whereas network monitoring is focused on assessing the performance and efficiency of computer networks, which connect devices and systems to enable data exchange.

Page performance monitoring:

Continuously evaluating and analyzing the speed, responsiveness, and overall user experience of a website or web application. This monitoring process focuses on understanding how well web pages load and function for users, aiming to ensure that they perform optimally.

Security monitoring:

The primary goal of security monitoring is to safeguard an organization's data, systems, and network infrastructure from unauthorized access, breaches, cyberattacks, and other security risks.

Performance analytics and data analysis 

Analyzing historical data identifying performance trends:

Data is the only asset we have in the digital world, we can use past data to recognize patterns, changes, and developments in performance-related metrics and key indicators.

Correlating metrics with user behavior (real user monitoring):

It is a valuable practice for gaining insights into how users interact with digital platforms and the impact of their actions on the system's performance. RUM involves collecting data directly from users' interactions with a website or application in real-time. The key metrics are page load time, transaction performance, user interactions as well as device and browser Information

Difference between web and mobile performance monitoring

Performance metrics are the one that comes into the picture when we discuss the difference between Web Performance Monitoring and Mobile Performance Monitoring, we focus on how a site performs on desktop and mobile browsers. Below are the several points that come into mind when we talk about web performance monitoring: 

• Page responsiveness: This measures how quickly a webpage responds to user interactions, such as clicking buttons or navigating menus. A responsive site is user-friendly.
• Resource loading: Monitoring the loading of resources like images, JavaScript, and CSS files ensures they don't slow down the page.
• Cross-browser compatibility: Checking how a website performs across different browsers and ensuring consistency is essential.

The mobile performance monitoring metrics totally differ from the web:

• App responsiveness: For mobile apps, responsiveness is about ensuring that the app functions smoothly and efficiently on various devices and screen sizes.
• Network conditions: Mobile users can have varying network speeds, from 4G to Wi-Fi to slower connections, so optimizing for these scenarios is crucial.
• Battery usage: Monitoring how much a mobile app drains a device's battery is important for user satisfaction.
• Mobile OS compatibility: Ensuring that a mobile app works seamlessly on different operating systems (e.g., iOS and Android) is essential for a broader user base.

Best practices for effective application performance monitoring

Effective Application Performance Monitoring is essential for keeping your software running smoothly. To achieve this below are few best practices you can follow:

• Continuously watch your app, collect lots of data on various aspects, and use real-time alerts to catch issues early. This will streamline better application performance monitoring. 
• Put yourself in the shoes of your users and ensure their experience remains top-notch.
• When things go awry, carry out a thorough investigation of the error in hand by going over logs and data.
• Refine your program's code, subject it to rigorous testing under diverse scenarios, and safeguard its security. 
• To be able to solve problems collaboratively in addition to being able to possess a healthy application, it is important to share knowledge with your team. This will help facilitate rock solid application performance monitoring.

Best practices for effective API performance monitoring

Knowing best practices can give you a good head start. Let’s have a look at some best practices for API performance monitoring:

1. These metrics cover topics like the speed at which your API replies to requests, the frequency with which errors occur, and the volume of traffic your API can handle.
2. Knowing what to measure is the first step in effectively monitoring your API's performance.
3. Log monitoring is crucial for tracking and analyzing events and errors to maintain API performance.
4. Monitoring CPU and memory usage provides insights into resource efficiency and helps optimize API performance.
5. Tracking API response time is vital for ensuring responsiveness and user satisfaction in real-time interactions.
6. Always ensure that you thoroughly hit and check your production endpoints with the same security level as your end-users to get quality results.

Best practices for effective page performance monitoring

We need to maintain effective page performance monitoring to facilitate a positive user experience and maintain the efficiency of websites and web applications.Here are some best practices to consider when implementing page performance monitoring.

1. Use real user monitoring (RUM): Real user monitoring is used to collect data/information directly from user interactions. It gives you an idea about how users are experiencing your digital application, that too in real time.
2. Historical analysis: You can analyze historical performance data to identify trends, patterns, and seasonality. It can be your guide to lay down a plan for the future.
3. Device and browser testing: You must ensure your app is working seamlessly for all your users irrespective of the device and browser they are on. 
4. Content optimization: To optimize content delivery and reduce page load time by can use techniques like content caching, content delivery networks (CDNs), and image compression.
5. User feedback: It's a good practice to collect user feedback, even when it comes to performance issues. For example, when you ask your users to share the reason for dropping off, one of the options you give them could be the site being slow. 

Security and data privacy in performance monitoring 

Determine the dangers and risks to privacy and data security by:

Handling sensitive data

• Implement access controls, encryption, and other security measures to secure data.
• Establish standards and compliance requirements. 
• Monitor and audit data breaches and other occurrences.
• Oversee and uphold the quality, correctness, and integrity of data.

Compliance with data privacy regulations

• Informed consent and transparency are not only moral and legal obligations but also bring practical benefits to your users. 
• Increase stakeholder trust, deepen user loyalty and satisfaction, boost user retention, and enhance peer collaboration.

User consent and transparency

• Treating users with respect and valuing their independence can ensure that they are more willing to dip into the research aspect and give honest feedback. 
• The confidence and loyalty of users in you will receive a tremendous boost if you inform them of the purpose and impact of your research.
• Giving users control over their participation can ensure that they don't leave owing to dissatisfaction.

How does Zipy help in performance monitoring? 

Zipy as a performance monitoring tool, contributes through various means. Zipy provides a full fledged API performance dashboard where you get insights starting from latency of APIs to its failure rate.

Also Zipy provides the number of actual users getting affected by slow APIs, which will allow you to prioritize better. Network splits are something which we always want to look at when it comes to debugging the slowness of APIs, and Zipy will provide the real point in time network which is there at the time of slowness, you really do not need to reproduce it. 

You can monitor the errors as well with the help of Zipy’s error dashboard, where you can get to know what kind of errors, types of errors as well as affected users information. Zipy provides a dashboard to look at consolidated metrics.

It is highly recommended to check Zipy out if you always want to be on the top of how your product is serving the user and if you want to fix issues proactively.

Conclusion

We can say that performance monitoring largely considers looking over the present state of your digital systems. Performance monitoring is a much needed practice that helps organizations sort out performance issues on a proactive and bring down cost by:

1. Optimizing user experience, 
2. Having a rock solid resource utilization, 
3. Making data driven decisions, 
4. Improving security, 
5. Benchmarking and analyzing trends, and 
6. Ensuring scalability and compliance

In addition to this, performance monitoring also plays an important role in reducing response time, throughput, resource utilization, and error rate. All of this indicates the system’s health and efficiency. If you effectively monitor these metrics, you can thoroughly ensure your app is performing well and also predict what might go wrong. 

Performance monitoring also plays a great role in user satisfaction, and there are many performance monitoring tools in the market that you can consider for your business. Now since you understand performance monitoring, it is a good time to pick a performance monitoring tool and start the journey.