Application Performance Monitoring Overview

What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?

APM provides insights into the performance of business-critical applications. Often these insights consist of metrics that capture CPU usage, response time, memory usage, network latency, rest call performance, slow classes, etc.

An effective APM platform will ensure that engineers can build intuitive reporting dashboards that reflect not only network performance and timeouts but also displays slow application launches affecting client-side satisfaction on top of offering defined crucial flows in order to track performance changes over time.

By conducting regular analysis of performance metrics you can also subsequently improve your application's user experience by pinpointing UI unresponsiveness.

The APM Stack Architecture

A stack refers to the combination of software components, technologies, and services that make up your application's technology stack or architecture. Logit.io provides you with an APM stack pre-configured with various nodes for high-performance and resilient ingestion, storage and visualization.

Ingestion Pipeline Layer

The ingestion pipeline is responsible for collecting data from various sources and sending it to a central location for processing and storage. The ingestion pipeline typically includes components like data collectors, agents, and connectors that can pull data from sources such as applications, servers, databases, logs, and external services.

Jaeger Collector

The Jaeger collector service within the Logit.io APM stack receives the traces from external Jaeger agents and forwards them to the ingestion pipeline to later be persisted by the storage database.

Kafka

Logit.io provides your APM stack with multiple Kafka nodes for high-performance and reliable ingestion. The Jaeger collector is pre-configured to pass the received traces to Kafka for processing.

Jaeger Ingester

The Jaeger ingester service reads the processed traces from Kafka and writes them to the storage database for persistence.

Storage Layer

APM uses OpenSearch as a persistent storage database for storing the received spans in a structured format, making it available for analysis using the Jaeger visualizer.

Visualization Layer

Logit.io provides the Jaeger visualizer as part of the APM stack for visualizing your distributed traces.

Working with your APM stack

Launching APM

You can launch the Jaeger visualizer to view your APM stack's data by pressing the Launch APM button found at the top of your Logit.io stack settings page:

If you have more than one Logit.io stack then you can also find this button directly on your dashboard:

Stack Plan

Below the Application Performance Monitoring header on the side navigation, found within your stack settings, you will find the Overview APM page. This will detail your stack plan, including how many spans per month your plan allows, the retention time period for stored data, and the versions of individual software components included with your APM stack.

View Statistics

Under the Application Performance Monitoring header on the side navigation, or from the stack settings overview page, you will find a link to the APM Statistics page.

The APM statistics page provides various statistics relating to your APM usage, including the total volume and span count collected today, historic usage, overusage based on your stack's current plan, and a more detailed usage table.

Managing your APM Services

To the far right of the APM section, you will find the 'manage stack' button. Clicking this link will take you to your stack details, from here you can view your stack version information as well as other capabilities.

Within this section, you can rebuild or delete your stack, if necessary. You can also, manage the data storage region for your Logit.io stacks, read more about this here. As well as this, you can view your stack ID and your spans per month according to your current plan.