22 Best Application Monitoring Tools Of 2024

Dynatrace is a unified observability platform whose solutions include modules for application observability and security, digital experience, infrastructure observability, automation, and business insights.

Why I picked Dynatrace: I picked Dynatrace because of Grail, a central observability and analytics tool. It collects causal data on a massive scale and delivers AI-powered insights with full context to help you make business decisions, which I felt would be especially useful for fintech companies. I also liked the ability to set custom parameters that flag unusual behavior.

Dynatrace standout features and integrations:

Features that make Dynatrace ideal for financial apps, in my opinion, include its support for BizDevOps with built-in BI tools that allow you to involve business teams in the development process.

I also liked that it allows you to set up targeted notifications so you can make sure the most qualified personnel are alerted whenever there’s an issue. For example, an indication of possible fraud could go to someone on the finance team, rather than the development team.

Integrations are pre-built for Jenkins, GitLab, JFrog, Microsoft Teams, Mulesoft, LaunchDarkly, ServiceNow, Jira, Prometheus, and Grafana.

Datadog is a monitoring and security platform for applications and infrastructure, with features such as logs and software delivery.

Why I picked Datadog: I picked Datadog because it’s an all-in-one monitoring solution that creates a single pane of glass to visualize not only your app, but also your associated networks, databases, infrastructure, and containers. I also liked how the collaboration features helped me bridge the gap between developers and business teams.

Datadog standout features and integrations:

Features that make Datadog ideal as a unified monitoring platform for applications and network environments, in my opinion, include the logging functions that provide audit trails, observability pipelines, and scanners for sensitive data.

It also allows you to manage the digital experience with in-depth functions that cover session recording and replay, error tracking, and real user and synthetic monitoring.

Integrations are pre-built for Argo CD, CircleCI, Travis CI, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Jira, GitLab, Auth0, Kubernetes, and Docker.

Instana Observability, often referred to simply as Instana, is an APM from IBM that provides automated full-stack visibility and quick notifications.

Why I picked IBM Instana: In my evaluation, I found that Instana has robust features for incident reporting, including AI-powered alerts. As soon as it discovers a service, it automatically starts tracking KPIs related to it, i.e., errors, load, and latency and sends out a notification whenever they go above or below an acceptable level.

IBM Instana standout features and integrations:

Features that I found make IBM Instana ideal for incident management include automatically recognizing and logging changes based on whether something goes live or offline, then tying it to other activity to determine if it needs to send an alert. It also provides you with contextual information when it does send an alert so you can decrease the amount of time you spend addressing issues in your application.

Integrations are pre-built for OpsGenie, Microsoft 365, Slack, Traefik, PagerDuty, Jaeger, TIBCO EMS, VMware Tanzu, Coralogix, and Splunk.

Logrocket is a monitoring platform whose main focus is on session replay for improving performance on web and mobile platforms.

Why I picked Logrocket: I believe online commerce platforms can get a lot out of Logrocket’s systems for managing user-reported issues. When a user brings something to your attention, you can initiate a live co-browsing session to walk them through a solution if it’s something they’re struggling to do on their own.

Logrocket standout features and integrations:

Features that made me recommend Logrocket for e-commerce apps include the front-end monitoring capabilities at the aggregate or session levels that let you keep an eye on vitals such as layout shifts, contentful paint, and input delays.

You can also pull time series and tables from conversion rates to create charts that allow you to analyze various metrics. You can also extend this by comparing two or more custom metrics.

Integrations are pre-built for GitHub, Google Analytics, Dynatrace, Adobe Analytics, Salesforce, Jira, New Relic, Trello, PagerDuty, and Datadog.

Google Cloud Operations, formerly called Stackdriver, is a suite of tools that provides functions for monitoring, scaling, logging, and troubleshooting.

Why I picked Google Cloud Operations: Google Cloud Operations takes advantage of Google Cloud-specific features to help you get more out of it. For example, I used Cloud Logging to specify and extract massive amounts of data from some GKE clusters I had running.

Google Cloud Operations standout features and integrations:

Features that made me recommend Operations for applications on Google Cloud include Cloud Monitoring, which increases observability by reporting statistics tied to uptime and performance so you have a better idea of their health.

With Cloud Audit Logs, I was able to get insights on user activity that was very close to real-time. Aside from the benefits as far as informing business decisions, this helps boost visibility and maintain compliance.

Integrations are native for Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery, as well as pre-built for New Relic, Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, PagerDuty, and Slack.

eG Innovations provides a unified infrastructure and application monitoring platform for on-premise and cloud-hosted deployments.

Why I picked eG Innovations: I chose eG Innovations for eG Enterprise, a monitoring tool that provides several features for monitoring applications built using Node.js. Out of the box, it supports the Node.js V8 Javascript Engine with automatic alerts for resource usage.

eG Innovations standout features and integrations:

Features that make eG Innovations’ Enterprise ideal for monitoring Node.js applications include the ability to evaluate transaction details in user sessions and URLs to measure code performance.

It also provides native support for some of the most common technologies I’ve paired with Node.js throughout my career, including MongoDB, Mongoose, MySQL, and Docker.

Integrations are pre-built for PagerDuty, Zendesk, ConnectWise, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow, SNOW ITOM, OpsGenie, and BMC RemedyForce.

Grafana is an open-source observability platform from Grafana Labs that can handle full-stack monitoring on both cloud and self-hosted environments.

Why I picked Grafana: I chose Grafana because it’s open-source and provides several useful monitoring features for users that want to go the self-managed route. One standout feature is Agent, which you can use to collect telemetry data, including traces, logs, and metrics, then send them to your preferred endpoint as long as it’s compatible with OpenTelemetry, Loki, or Prometheus.

Grafana standout features and integrations:

Features that made me recommend Grafana include its transparency and accessibility. Being open-source gives you the option to build your own features, and generally makes for more secure and cost-effective products. I also liked that you can try a fully-interactive online demo without having to contact the sales team. If your project needs additional monitoring, you can easily integrate additional Grafana tools for both back-end and front-end monitoring, which provide the ability to collect real-user data for logs, metrics, traces, and events.

Integrations are pre-built for GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Consul, Traefik, Snowflake, CloudWatch, Kafka, Redis, and Oracle Database.

CloudWatch is an APM that makes up part of the AWS family from Amazon, with a focus on collecting logs and metrics across clouds.

Why I picked Amazon CloudWatch: Even though CloudWatch is a versatile tool that you can deploy even on-premise, I’ve found it works best if you keep it on AWS. You can use it to monitor apps you’ve deployed under different AWS accounts and services, including ECS, S3, and Lambda, and get data from all of them in one place.

Amazon CloudWatch standout features and integrations:

Features that make CloudWatch my preferred APM for AWS include the fact that it’s FedRamp and PCI compliant, with the option to use Amazon Key Management Service (KMS) to encrypt logs and increase security compliance.

As far as gathering the logs, you have several options if you’re on AWS, including VPC Flow Logs and Route 53 for vended logs or collecting them from AWS services that publish them, including ECS and API Gateway.

Integrations are native for other AWS products and services, including DynamoDB, CloudTrail, ECS, EKS, FarGate, API Gateway, VPC Flow Logs, Route 53, Lambda, and EventBridge.

Honeycomb is an event management platform for distributed services that seeks to provide insight from one hub.

Why I picked Honeycomb: If the application you’re looking to monitor is actually a game, then I think Honeycomb might be the right solution for your team. I tested its distributed tracing functions as implemented alongside a feature called BubbleUp; BubbleUp analyzes requests from different teams for common trends to give you a more holistic picture of how users interact with the product. In a game development scenario, the data could be about players and collected from teams such as development, audio, and design.

Honeycomb standout features and integrations:

Features that make Honeycomb ideal for game development companies, in my opinion, include Service Map, which creates a visual representation of all linked services in your application; this is a valuable tool for monitoring games designed as microservices, considering you can also use it to conduct visual debugging.

OpenTelemetry allows you to instrument your code for Honeycomb so you can generate your own telemetry data. You only need to set it up once, and you can use the data on any back-end service you want, so you don’t worry about being locked into a vendor.

Integrations are pre-built for GitHub, LaunchDarkly, CircleCI, Terraform, Consul, AWS Lambda, Slack, PagerDuty, Chef, and GitLab.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a multi-platform monitoring solution that works with IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS setups.

Why I picked SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor: I used SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to poll dependencies in my test app. At the end of the process, I’d increased visibility by having a detailed map of the incoming network connections and their destinations across the app.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor standout features and integrations:

Features that made me recommend SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor as a good tool for dependency management include the option to set up alerts for issues such as packet loss and latency for dependent services.

You also use it to get forecasts for server resource usage based on historical trends so you can pre-empt overloading.

Integrations are pre-built for Microsoft 365, Dynamics CRM and SharePoint, Azure, AWS, Redis, HAProxy, Oracle Database, NGINX, and IBM Db2.