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Getting started with APM

Getting Started with Splunk APM step 1 of 6
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​Concepts and value proposition

In order to make the most of your investment in Splunk Application Performance Monitoring, it is important that you understand some core concepts and the value this product/technology aims to deliver.

What is Splunk APM?

Splunk Application Performance Monitoring is an application performance monitoring and troubleshooting solution for microservices-based applications. APM monitors applications by collecting distributed traces. A trace is a collection of spans or actions that occur to complete a transaction.

What problems does Splunk APM help solve?

Splunk Application Performance Monitoring helps with visualizing and understanding complex distributed environments that are critical to business functions, productivity and customer experience. It provides capabilities to reduce MTTR via unmatched levels of visualization and troubleshooting features.

What are some business initiatives APM ties into?

  • Adoption of the cloud and microservices. Trying to make the most of the benefits produced by the cloud, which includes developing and operating in the cloud along with microservices architectures
  • Reduction of downtime. More engineering teams pushing more code, faster, always introduces risk of an outage or issue. APM provides the ability to better understand where an issue may be occurring in a distributed environment.
  • Innovation. Confidence in operations and real-time visibility into the impact of changes foster innovation. Additionally, lock-in with single vendors leads to higher prices without added value and slows down innovation. Development time spent integrating a proprietary single-vendor solution is wasted time.

How does it work?

Through implementing instrumentation on the desired apps, Splunk Application Performance Monitoring collects and analyzes every span and trace that an application’s instrumentation generates. This provides full-fidelity, infinite cardinality exploration of trace data an application generates, enabling you to break down and analyze application performance along any dimension.

What does adoption of APM look like?

Splunk Application Performance Monitoring is all about answering the question “Where is the problem?” and providing guided troubleshooting workflows to pinpoint exactly where the problem may be occurring in a distributed environment. APM is powered by full-fidelity, no-sample tracing. This essentially means that APM looks at 100% of the data instead of a sample. For customers to adopt this product and gain the most value, they must send in trace data from their distributed environment via instrumentation; leverage this data for troubleshooting purposes when they are alerted of issues; and make use of the valuable features like tags, Tag Spotlight, and Business Workflows.