Selecting the right application monitoring software can be a critical decision for any IT professional monitoring and managing a plethora of applications. By obtaining an application monitoring software, amongst other things, the software constantly monitors your applications so you don’t have to. The sooner you can realize and address any potential issues with your applications, the sooner you can address them and continue business as usual. From transaction tracing, tracking metrics, setting up alerts, generating reports, monitoring your system in real-time and more, today we take a look at some of the most important features when choosing the right application monitoring software for your business or personal needs.

An often overlooked yet often important aspect of choosing any new software can be the aesthetic friendliness and user intuitiveness. The faster you (and your employees) can pick up the software and use it to its full capabilities, the faster you can realize the full potential of the software and be successful in using it. A steep learning curve can prove to be a major road block in implementing new software, leading to hours of training and ultimately taking away from your daily duties just to learn the software.

Tracing features in your application monitoring software can prove to be a major benefit as well as they allow you to perform a few major tasks. For one, tracing and visualizing where your application is spending its time is a huge benefit as you can’t begin to address and fix an issue that you can’t physically see. From large to small transactions your application makes, collecting that data and tracking it at all levels is very important feature to consider. Tracing activity between applications can also prove to be an often overlooked feature that tracks activity between piers and maps the activity in easy to visualize charts and graphs. By breaking down individual transactions, you can receive performance details for everything from percentage of time, average length of transaction and average number of transactions for a set period of time.

Setting up alert notifications for varying thresholds within your application monitoring software can prove to be the difference between an early recognized problem and being late to react to one that can cripple your system or worse your business efficiency. By setting up custom alerts that can be set for a variety of scenarios, most software allow for alerts to be set up by way of email, text and especially notifications on your software’s dashboard.

Any software that tracks efficiency and real time statistics that your company relies on, will be sure to offer custom and critical reports that allow for the daily, monthly and quarterly review of results. Most application monitoring software on the market today allow for custom reports to be setup to build any set of metrics you desire. One such report may be an availability report which measures your websites uptime. This kind of report will not only chart transactions per minute, but also errors per minute for a select period of time. This information and metric tracking will ultimately be critical to in conjunction with the overall performance of your applications.

As with any application or software you are considering making an investment, it’s always a good idea to check and see if there is free trial or demo available. By downloading a demo version of the software, you can see from an aesthetic standpoint whether or not the software is one you will easily be able to pick up and if the intricacies of the software will align well with your current arsenal of software and applications.