Performance monitoring guides
Use this in-depth guide to understand Performance monitoring guides, make better monitoring decisions, and turn measurements into actions that protect real users.
What Is Performance Monitoring?
Performance monitoring is the continuous measurement of systems, applications or websites to understand speed, availability, reliability and resource behavior.
GuideWhat Is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?
Application performance monitoring (APM) is the practice of observing software behavior so teams can detect slow transactions, errors and service dependencies.
GuideWhat Is Website Performance Monitoring?
Website performance monitoring measures availability, responsiveness and user experience so site owners can identify outages and slow pages.
GuideWhat Is Observability?
Observability is the ability to understand a system's internal state from the telemetry it produces, typically including metrics, logs and traces.
GuideWhat Is Uptime Monitoring?
Uptime monitoring checks whether a website, API or service is reachable and responding as expected at regular intervals.
GuideWhat Is Real User Monitoring (RUM)?
Real user monitoring measures the performance experienced by actual visitors by collecting browser or application telemetry during real sessions.
GuideWhat Is Synthetic Monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring uses scripted or automated checks to test services and user journeys from controlled environments.
GuideWhat Is Infrastructure Monitoring?
Infrastructure monitoring tracks the health and resource usage of servers, containers, cloud services and related systems.
GuideWhat Is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for generating, collecting and exporting telemetry such as traces, metrics and logs.
GuideAPM vs Observability: What Is the Difference?
APM focuses on application behavior and performance, while observability is a broader approach for understanding system state through telemetry and context.
GuideLogs vs Metrics vs Traces
Logs record events, metrics summarize measurements over time, and traces follow requests across services. Together they provide complementary observability context.
GuideAPM vs RUM
APM primarily explains server-side application behavior, while RUM measures the experience of real users in browsers or applications.
GuideRUM vs Synthetic Monitoring
RUM observes real users while synthetic monitoring runs controlled tests. Using both can reveal both actual experience and repeatable baseline behavior.
GuideMonitoring vs Observability
Monitoring tracks known signals and conditions; observability helps teams explore unfamiliar system behavior using rich telemetry and context.
GuideAPM vs Infrastructure Monitoring
APM focuses on software transactions and application behavior, while infrastructure monitoring focuses on hosts, containers, cloud resources and system health.
GuideWhat Is Distributed Tracing?
Distributed tracing follows a request across multiple services, helping teams understand latency, dependencies and failure points in distributed systems.
GuideWhat Is Website Uptime?
Website uptime is the proportion of time a website is available and can respond to requests during a measured period.
GuideWhat Is Website Response Time?
Website response time is the elapsed time between a request and the response received from a server or endpoint.
GuideWhat Is TTFB?
Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures how long it takes from starting a request until the first byte of the response is received.
GuideWhat Are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are Google-defined user-experience metrics that evaluate loading, responsiveness and visual stability on web pages.
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