What is APM?

APM stands for Application Performance Monitoring or Application Performance Management. It’s a set of tools and practices that help you track, monitor, and optimize the performance of your applications.

In simple terms, APM helps answer:

  • Why is my app slow?
  • What happens when users interact with the app?
  • Where exactly is the performance bottleneck?

Why Use APM?

Imagine a user clicks a button on your website and it takes forever to respond. With APM, you can:

  • Trace the request through every microservice.
  • See how long each database call took.
  • Detect memory leaks or inefficient code paths.

Key Features of APM Tools

  • Distributed Tracing – see how a request flows through services.
  • Metrics Collection – CPU, memory, latency, error rate, etc.
  • Alerting – set thresholds and get notified when something breaks.
  • Dashboards – visualize trends and system health.

APM in Action (Example)

Using OpenTelemetry with Jaeger:

# Install OpenTelemetry Collector
kubectl apply -f otel-collector.yaml

# Add instrumentation in your app
otel.SetTracerProvider(...)

# View traces in Jaeger UI

Conclusion

APM is your friend when it comes to understanding what’s really going on in production. It helps you deliver faster, more reliable applications — and sleep better at night.

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