By logical dot 
Business applications have become an essential component of any organization. Whether they are off-the-shelf or custom-built, these applications are made to increase productivity, streamline processes, and increase efficiency.
However, how can you be sure these business applications fulfil their promises? The solution is to track and analyze key performance metrics. These metrics enable teams to:
- Identify issues
- Optimize performance
- Ensure a seamless user experience
This post will look at six crucial metrics that can help you evaluate how well your business apps are working:
1. Throughput
Throughput is a measure of how many requests or transactions an application can process in a given period. It shows how successfully a program manages a large number of tasks. Therefore, more throughput typically translates into improved scalability and performance.
It should not be forgotten that a variety of factors, such as memory, disk I/O, and network bandwidth, affect throughput.
It is an interesting metric to track, regardless, since it can be used for benchmarking, identifying resource constraints, and ensuring optimal resource utilization.
Considering how well it compares the performance of applications and systems under different loads, it also serves as a decision-maker.
2. Request Rate
The success of your application will depend on how well you understand the amount of traffic it receives. All other application performance metrics could be impacted by changes in traffic.
Request rates can be used to understand the dynamics of how your application scales by correlating them with other application performance metrics.
Monitoring the request rate could also be helpful in identifying any spikes or even idleness. A sudden halt in traffic to your busy API could be a serious warning sign.
Another similar but very different statistic is tracking the number of concurrent users. Another intriguing statistic to watch for correlations is this one.
3. User Satisfaction
One important indicator of how satisfied consumers are with your business applications is user satisfaction. It can be quantified using a variety of methods, such as user reviews, feedback forms, and surveys.
Take into account the following elements while assessing customer satisfaction:
- Usability: Is it simple to use and navigate the application?
- Functionality: Does the program satisfy the requirements and expectations of the user?
- Performance: Is the program responsive and free of technical glitches?
- Support: Can users get the help they need when they need it?
4. Tracking error rates
App errors have the potential to seriously impair the user experience and drive people away. Therefore, it is essential to monitor problems and promptly correct them. The error rate measure is used for this purpose.
Error rates show what proportion of requests (made to an application) are unsuccessful or result in errors. An app with a high error rate is more likely to crash or malfunction, which can negatively affect the user experience. Here are three popular methods for monitoring application errors:
- Error Rate for HTTP: The proportion or quantity of requests that result in HTTP error codes
- Logged exceptions: The total number of unresolved and documented mistakes in your application is known as “logged exceptions.”
- User-reported Error: Errors reported by users themselves are known as user-reported errors.
5. Resource Utilization
The web application is effectively using server resources thanks to metrics that track resource usage. This improves the app’s performance by preventing bottlenecks. Typical measures of resource usage include:
- CPU Usage: The percentage of CPU resources being utilized. Your server’s high CPU use affects the performance of your applications. Monitoring CPU use by the server is essential. Combining or aggregating the CPU utilization information from each of these distinct instances of your application running on different servers is also crucial.
- Network Bandwidth: A network’s bandwidth is the amount of data that can be sent over it.
- Memory Usage: The quantity of RAM that the program uses. This indicator helps us understand how the app manages and uses its resources.
- Disk I/O: The rate at which data is written and read to disk storage.
6. Application Availability
One important indicator you should be watching is whether or not your application is online and accessible. This is how most businesses gauge uptime for service level agreements (SLAs).
The easiest way to monitor your online service’s availability is with a simple scheduled HTTP check.
For example, Retrace may run these HTTP “ping” tests for you once every minute. It might monitor response times and status codes and even browse the website for specific content.
The Final Thoughts
A close watch on these six key metrics will tell you a lot about how well your business apps are performing. This information can help you identify areas that require improvement, improve performance, and ultimately maximize your digital investment.
Keep in mind that ongoing assessment and monitoring are necessary to guarantee that your apps continue to meet your changing business requirements.