Rethinking APM with Logz.io App 360

As we continue to navigate the ongoing evolution of  the observability landscape, Logz.io is  constantly striving to provide our customers with the advanced platform capabilities needed to make sense of their increasingly complex environments.

Sometimes that means taking a new approach to long-standing practices. For years, organizations have relied on application performance monitoring (APM) tools to help address  their needs for determining what’s happening with their business-critical applications.

But times have changed and we know customers need a new approach, especially in the world of Kubernetes and increasingly ephemeral environments. APMs, despite their benefits, simply were not designed with today’s microservices and complex cloud architectures in mind, and this is why so many APM users are looking for a new observability-driven approach.

In a recent webinar, we took a brief walk through the history of the APM market and detailed the benefits of our new App 360 solution in support of our Logz.io Open 360™ platform. Importantly, we also conducted a quick demo to help everyone see what this new APM alternative looks like in action.

If you missed the App 360 webinar, you can watch the replay here, and check out the recap below.

APM’s History: How Did We Get Here?

Looking back where we’ve come to arrive at this point in time is a great way of understanding how requirements have evolved; so, we thought that we’d provide a brief historical overview of APM and how we got where we are today. It’s perhaps an oversimplified version of the story, but the involved technology has matured over many years from simple tools that were hard to integrate with other systems into the current need for highly-granular “full stack” observability. 

Again, traditional APMs undoubtedly have their strengths. They provide a centralized capability to consolidate and visualize foundational data to monitor the performance of business critical applications, ensure digital services run smoothly, generate reports for compliance with SLAs, and allow for efficient troubleshooting.

Yet, APMs also have significant limitations. Beyond the fact that the telemetry being monitored is a point in time snapshot versus a real time view, or the fact that this analysis is done in a “black box” fashion that lacks the degree of granularity needed to truly understand the “how and why” of complex performance implications, they’re also extremely heavy to implement and expensive to operate. All of this leaves practitioners looking for something different.

This is why there’s now a huge demand for more unified, real-time visibility into complex cloud applications running on microservices architectures. Traditional APM just isn’t enough to meet these needs. They’re also very hard to implement, and costly to license. 

 At the end of the day, what developers mainly care about is how an application is performing, and any details needed to understand troubleshooting of emerging problems. The “send us all your data” approach isn’t just expensive, it also introduces far more complexity than needed in trying to gain valuable insights.

Simplicity is more important than having too much information. Decluttering so you only have the info you need so you can troubleshoot when necessary is critical. This is where observability can help.

App 360: Modern, Observability-Focused APM Alternative

We believe in an observability-based approach to APM, or what we call application observability.

App 360 is about providing customers with the ability to address production issues and also do so at a reasonable cost compared to traditional APM platforms. It’s an approach grounded in the idea that it has to be quick to implement and deliver a single view of application health and performance, immediately. 

In this way, we’re offering a truly efficient solution that delivers a unified perspective into the health and performance of applications, one that helps easily surface production issues so you can drill into root causes faster. It’s purpose-built to help engineers debug their microservices with less time and less manual effort.

App 360 is also different from traditional APMs in that it eliminates the common challenge of operating your monitoring data in silos. The whole idea here is centralized visibility into your complex microservices architectures in a manner that enables consolidated insights and targeted investigation.

Finally, like every element of the Open 360 approach, App 360 is uniquely designed to cost less to own and operate based on AI-driven observability data pipeline analytics. The move away from heavy, coding-level APM instrumentation to use an approach based on OpenTelemetry, one designed to democratize the involved data, also doesn’t force you into the same level of vendor lock-in as legacy APM providers.

We’ve put in a lot of work into the Open 360 platform to directly support the notion of rapid “time to value.” How can organizations get from zero to having everything instrumented, and have alerting and dashboarding ready to go to help you get the information you need right away? We maintain that this is the way.

App 360 is a major addition in providing Logz.io customers with the bird’s-eye view of what’s needed to address application health in as fast and cost-effective manner as possible.

Worth noting—App 360 is not an additional product that needs to be licensed by existing  Logz.io users—you simply need to ship us your tracing data and your team can begin using it immediately.

At the end of the day, App 360 is purpose-built to deliver your single pane of glass for observability and applications performance.

If you’d like to give App 360 a try yourself, try our Open 360 free trial or request a demo to get started!