Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as Oracle, Workday, SAP, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 are critical for the day-to-day operations of your business. In order to ensure nothing goes wrong with your business-critical apps, and to get the most ROI from your ERP systems, it is imperative that you monitor your applications.

Application downtime and performance issues can negatively impact on your business, including loss of customers, data breaches, fines and penalties, and reputational damage. We wrote about some of these application failures here. But by continuously monitoring your application, you can take a proactive approach to ensure worst-case scenarios don’t happen, and easily address performance problems.

In this blog, we’ll discuss application monitoring, why it’s important, and the benefits it can bring to your organization.

What is Application Monitoring?
Monitoring software relies on real-time checks and the management of applications based on different performance metrics to ensure business continuity and user satisfaction. This helps system admins keep track of application availability, resource use, bugs, and other critical components that affect the end-user experience (UX). Continuous monitoring of applications prevents IT downtime and stabilizes the IT ecosystem.

Why Monitoring Your Application is Important
Why it's important to monitor your application
As mentioned in the introduction, application monitoring helps you detect performance problems and critical issues early on, and solve them before they negatively impact your business. Similar to the way a bouncer in a club monitors the crowd to make sure nobody gets too rowdy, application monitoring ensures that your system is behaving as well.

Monitoring your application…

Alerts you to downtime before it occurs and prevents outages.

Application monitoring provides you insights on server and CPU usage, network traffic, and application responses to requests to gauge potential performance problems. Real user monitoring helps to identify issues like slow response times or errors even before they impact the actual end-user experience.

Provides insight into complex ERP landscape

ERP systems are complex, with multiple interconnected tiers. Since an issue in one tier can cascade issues in multiple dependent tiers, application monitoring reveals what parts of the application need your attention. Application monitoring provides a full picture of application performance, as well as associated business operations, helping you identify reasons for performance troubles. Application monitoring is also critical to helping you determine application dependencies.

‍Pinpoints bottlenecks and increases efficiency

By combining code-level tracing, application metrics, exception tracking, and error and event logs, application monitoring offers a complete picture of application performance. Using this information, DevOps team can easily identify bottlenecks and decide which issues need immediate attention.

‍Aligns with cloud-based ERPs’ continuous development and updates process

Application monitoring ensures that the commitment to service level agreements (SLAs) are fulfilled. Without searching through logs or running ad hoc scripts, you can easily figure out what is causing an ERP application slowdown.

Enhances the performance and stability of all your integrations

As enterprise apps hardly operate standalone, application monitoring helps you understand how a system is likely to respond to user requests. You will understand whether systems meet performance and availability requirements.

What you should look for in an application performance monitoring (APM) tool

Now that you understand why monitoring your application is important, you need to choose the best tool to handle the actual monitoring. Here are a few things to consider when evaluating APM solutions.

Ease of use: An APM tool should deliver value immediately. Setup should be quick and painless, it should be easy to use for both technical and non-technical employees, and reporting should be comprehensive and automatic.
Auto-discovery: In addition to monitoring application performance, an APM should also be able to auto-discover existing configurations and provide code-level details for transactions. This helps application managers reduce response time by quickly identifying the root causes of any performance degradation.

Support for full stack tracing: Because ERPs are such complex applications, an APM tool should support full stack tracing across all integrations.
Website monitoring: Your APM should have the capacity to monitor a complete navigational path, including DOM Load, Page Load, and more.
Native mobile apps: Monitoring should include mobile apps across all different carriers and all types of devices.
Reporting & analytics: The ability to easily customize and automate reports, dashboards, and alerts should be included as part of the APM solution.
Behavior detection: Your APM should collect data in real time and intelligently identify inconsistent patterns.
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Conclusion
Application monitoring is a proactive approach to preventing downtime and performance issues with your ERP solution. When selecting an APM solution, look for one like Opkey that’s easy to use, provides detailed reports, and supports web, mobile and integration monitoring.