APM Insight and Real User Monitoring: Year in review

2020 was a whirlwind of a year that took all of us by surprise. As we transitioned to working from home and virtual meetings, we reorganized our priorities, listened to your feedback and requirements, and worked around the clock to deliver a hassle-free monitoring experience.

Here's a quick recap of the features we rolled out last year, and a brief note on our plans for 2021.

Analyze your data the way you want

You can compare your application performance before and after deployment using the milestone view. This helps you quickly assess when there is a degradation in your app performance or vice-versa. You can also slice and dice APM metrics for a custom period from the last 24 days to the last 30 days.

New features and additional insights

We now support monitoring for self-contained applications in a .NET Core environment. Also, you can track and analyze .NET Core applications hosted in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment, as well as via the NuGet Package Manager.

For Java applications, JMX metrics are now tracked and monitored by default. JMX metrics, in addition to JVM metrics, help you gain deeper insights into your Java app performance. Monitoring support for Nexus, SonarQube, and MySQL 8 is now available.

You can now use configuration rules to automatically enable or add APM Insight for applications in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) monitors.

Other updates

Previously, you would have received alerts only when your applications went into Down or Trouble states. Now, you will also receive UP alerts when your application is back to normal.

You can also configure IT automation for APM Insight applications to help you take corrective actions when your applications go into a down or trouble state. This will also help you reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) for your application.

Additionally, you can mark scheduled maintenance. When you mark your application state as scheduled maintenance, downtime will not be considered under maintenance time, and you won’t receive any DOWN alerts.

To make monitoring easier, you can now configure custom instrumentation via the Site24x7 client, instead of adding it via the code/conf file.

The Site24x7 mobile app now supports APM Insight, enabling you to view APM metrics on the go.

Enhancements in Real User Monitoring (RUM)

We have released some real user monitoring enhancements to make end-user monitoring easy for you.

• In general, you can analyze your website performance across various devices accessed by your end-users. Now, you can also monitor device metrics, i.e., connection types, viewports, and device memory. This can help you correlate your website performance in the respective devices.

• For a chosen time, you can view the total and active sessions for your site. This helps you correlate if higher traffic or users are impacting your site performance.

• You can filter JS errors based on error type, file, browser, or URL to inspect and narrow down root cause. You can also upload your sourcemaps to find the exact line of error.

• You can view geography, device, and browser summary, along with percentile split-up values for key metrics like response time, front-end, back-end, first byte, and network time for individual web transactions. Previously, similar transactions were grouped by obfuscating alpha-numeric characters; now, you can view similar transactions individually.

Apart from the updates mentioned above, we have expanded our support for more frameworks and application platforms. You can view all of these details under the What's new section, and also in our release notes. We have also introduced filterable performance and user session details to Real User Monitoring; this is currently in the beta version, so if you'd like to obtain early access, kindly drop an email to support@site24x7.com.  

As 2021 unfolds, we plan to bring out more features focusing on APM and server integration, support for serverless applications, and one agent. We hope to make monitoring seamless and more efficient for you every step of the way.

From all of us at Site24x7 and Zoho, we wish you a happy, safe, and prosperous 2021!