For the IT professionals in the current business landscape, monitoring and actively managing the often changing and meticulous applications used to run your business can be a headache. With that and as with many software tools in today’s tech landscape application monitoring tools can often be best utilized when fully cloud integrated, allowing the administrator to monitor all of their applications in real-time that are ran in their organization or network from anywhere they may be. Let’s take a look at some of the key functionality options and features you will want to consider when choosing the best application monitoring tool to fit you (or your company’s) needs.

Performing a tracing and root cause analysis on your list of applications is often one of the more important functions that any application monitoring tool can perform. By tracing an application, you can identify the slowest application operations and determine the exact area or application to focus your efforts to achieve optimum efficiency. Many cloud based application monitoring tools can accumulate large amounts of data and code to determine their execution timing and performance. If you are running applications that perform many high end user transactions such as credit card transactions or other user based queries that rely on customer satisfaction, you will want to find a tool that gives you high-detail information to conduct your root cause analysis. Whether it’s the utilization of your CPU dashboard or a bad line of code, the more information your application monitoring tool can provide is what you want to look for. With that said, you will also want to make sure the tool you choose supports the applications you use and the appropriate plug-ins and compatibility that fit your needs.

Another key feature you want to look for in your choice of application monitoring tool is an intuitive and easy to read dashboard that features key metrics that you will require to adequately track your litany of applications daily. Some of the most important metrics you will want to look for are number of requests detailed by time, end user response time (as touched on above), highest end user response time, page rendering and loading time and number of coding errors over a set period of time. In a transaction based business, you will want a tool that looks at the transaction piece of your business as a whole, detailing everything from the number of transactions completed, to identifying the slowest and fastest transactions.

If your company uses applications that many of its customers use on a daily basis, it’s a good idea to look for a tool that offers real user monitoring to track metrics and data from them in real-time. By tracking customer’s habits and movements within the application, you can make effective business decisions that can have a wide range of impact. With real user monitoring, you can test and track a variety of issues based on unique attributes such as location of the end user and type of web browser they are using. Depending on the size of your operation, and as with everything today, monitoring your applications via your smartphone is also a feature that many IT professionals find valuable in looking for an application monitoring tool.