Application performance monitoring (APM)

Use APM to gather performance metrics from the services powering your application and create distributed traces that follow the path of individual transactions through the entire application stack. The APM metrics cover key performance indicators like latency (request duration, percentiles, etc), error rate, per-host and per-transaction metrics, etc. Distributed tracing follows the path of requests through your entire application: across RPC calls, through queues, and more.

This data provides insight into database, cache, and remote service usage, as well as the performance of each transaction. You can also inspect transaction traces that involved requests to the monitored service. Trace context can be added, providing the ability to correlate application log messages from a traced transaction, and if sampled, the log messages to the transaction trace detail. See Trace context in logs.

APM allows you to identify the root cause of slowness or errors in your application. You can determine if the service you're monitoring is spending most of the time in a particular codebase, or if there is a single host that's running slower than the rest.

Monitor a service in SolarWinds Observability

To monitor an application's services, deploy the APM library that uses the same language as the application in your application stack. Use a Service key to connect the library to your SolarWinds Observability organization. While these libraries require no manual instrumentation or configuration to get started, there are advanced options available to customize the metrics you monitor and to deploy traces that fit your specific needs. There are also SDKs for each language to further enhance your monitoring options and enable you to monitor using alternative frameworks. See Add a service.

View information about services

Use the APM area overview to view metric data gathered from all services powering your application.

Use the Entity Explorer to view a list of your observed services.

Click a service name in the APM area overview or the Entity Explorer to view detailed information about that service.

You can review your service's performance metrics in the Metrics Explorer and find the highest sources of latency in the Traces Explorer.