The Truth About APM and Database Monitoring with Quest

IT infrastructure, like many other aspects of business, is subject to constant change brought on by modernity. In terms of database (DB) monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM), current changes in IT infrastructure can lead to key improvements in operational resilience, putting your company at the forefront of application system performance.

Experts from Quest Software joined DBAwebinar, APM and DB Monitoring: Necessity or Overkill? to present key insights into the areas of APM and database monitoring, illustrating how IT strategies can be transformed to best align with today’s applications and business.

Mark Gowdy, SW sales engineer, senior director at Quest Software, explained that APM “enables organizations to understand how users are interacting with their applications and assess the overall user experience.” This provides insight into application performance as workloads change, while also proactively uncovering issues that may arise, Gowdy added.

While APM tools help improve user experience, increase productivity, reduce costs, speed application deployment, and more, application complexity has changed the game. As we move from monolithic to microservices architectures, “the number of things you have to do to make sure your application is stable has increased,” Gowdy said. Today’s multi-tiered microservices architectures are infinitely more complex than their monolithic predecessors, which inevitably impacts APM.

While undoubtedly more complex, APM has also become more necessary as microservices architectures have become the norm — a Gartner report that found 74% of organizations are now using microservices architectures. Many organizations can turn to a plethora of point solutions for their APM needs, but these tools provide very limited visibility into overall application performance, ultimately creating silos and increasing inefficiencies, according to Gowdy.

Amit Parikh, SW Sales Engineer, Architect at Quest Software, explained that database observability is the answer to the APM complexity problem. Data is the foundation of software applications, and by prioritizing improving the data infrastructure, enterprises can achieve significant success in the performance of their applications.

“In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, the choices you make can significantly impact your success,” Parikh said. “It’s not just about building software; it’s about using that data to drive innovation, and then you can meet user expectations.”

This starts with choosing a database; “as software becomes more data-intensive, the role of the database becomes critical. A slow, expensive, or even unreliable database is not just a technical problem; it poses significant challenges to software teams,” Parikh noted. A slow database leads to a poor user experience, while expensive databases divert resources away from critical development efforts.

Understanding that the database is the heart of an application is key, because slow queries or database failures can bring the application to a halt—no matter how well other components are performing. Database performance, reliability, and security all determine how well an application will succeed, according to Parikh.

Connecting the dots between Gowdy and Parikh, Bharath Vasudevan, head of go-to-market at Quest Software, explained that organizations will need to find a place for both APM and DB monitoring. While an APM tool can help enterprise teams better understand application performance in real time, identify slowdowns and anomalies, improve incident response times, and provide end-to-end visibility, DB monitoring is an additional layer of defense that doesn’t focus solely on remediation, but rather addresses application issues at the source.

Vasudevan emphasized that monitoring of APM and DB should NO be a matter of either/or, but instead, both/and. The cost of failure alone is reason enough to implement both tools, because when using only an APM tool, the failures, revenue impact, and total additional cost are significantly higher than when used in conjunction with DB monitoring.

To watch the full, detailed version of the webinar, including detailed explanations, examples, and a Q&A session, you can watch the archived version of the webinar here.