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Application performance monitoring

Identify and solve the root causes of performance disruptions with application performance monitoring.

Application performance monitoring tools use a combination of telemetry data and software to determine the root causes of slow performance and service disruptions. Application performance monitoring helps ensure users have a positive experience every time they use an app, resulting in more traffic and higher conversion rates.

What are application performance monitoring tools?

Speed gauge illustrating site performance acceleration

Application performance is only increasing in importance. Study after study demonstrates the importance of loading speed for user engagement, and website performance has become a huge factor for SEO as well. But complex infrastructure and the range of users for modern applications across multiple devices and in a variety of locations make it difficult to identify and fix the root causes of application challenges, or even to understand the actual end user experience.

Application performance monitoring tools provide visibility into how an application is actually performing from the user perspective, along with analyzing the infrastructure powering the application.

Speed gauge illustrating site performance acceleration

Benefits of application performance monitoring tools

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Rapid root cause identification

Discover the problem components of an application quickly in order to solve issues and minimize downtime.

Lower operating costs

Identify inefficiencies in backend infrastructure in order to keep operating costs low.

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Search engine optimization (SEO)

Optimize website Core Web Vitals in order to improve chances of ranking highly in organic search.

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Gain insights into user experience

See how users are actually experiencing an application in real time.

Use cases for application performance monitoring tools

Below are just some of the use cases for these tools.

Monitoring infrastructure

Teams can gain a view of how their infrastructure behaves in real-world conditions, as services are being provided to actual users.

Learn about ensuring application availability
Real user monitoring (RUM)

Analyze end user data in order to understand how an application typically performs, and how it should perform during periods of peak usage.

Read about Cloudflare Observatory
Digital experience monitoring (DEM)

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) allows IT teams to track and optimize digital experiences using historical, real-time, and predictive data.

Get started with DEM
Web performance

Application performance monitoring can help ensure that website TCP connection time, DNS response time, Time to First Byte (TTFB), and page load time are optimized.

Learn about Browser Insights
Case studies
Pacsun & Cloudflare

Learn how turning to Cloudflare resulted in fashion retailer Pacsun seeing a 27% increase in system performance on day one.

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Hyperconnect & Cloudflare

Learn how Cloudflare helped Hyperconnect reduce the latency of their global streaming services, which improved user engagement.

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Ready to get started? We can help.

Learn more about application performance monitoring tools

Additional resources

Blog: Introducing Browser Insights

"To improve speed, you first need to measure it. That's why we're launching Browser Insights: a new tool that measures the performance of your website from the perspective of your users..."

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Blog: Understanding end user-connectivity and performance with Digital Experience Monitoring

"Cloudflare's Digital Experience Monitoring product gives teams of any size the same toolkit that we use to measure our own global network that powers nearly one-fourth of the Internet each day..."

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Blog: Start measuring Web Vitals with Browser Insights

"Today, we're partnering with the Google Chrome team to bring Web Vitals measurements into Browser Insights. Web Vitals are a set of metrics to help web developers..."

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Blog: Faster website, more customers: Cloudflare Observatory can help your business grow

"Website performance is crucial to the success of online businesses. Study after study has shown that an increased load time directly affects sales. In highly competitive markets the performance of a website is crucial for success..."

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Article: What are the Core Web Vitals (CWV)?

"The Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of three web performance metrics. Google's search engine measures these three metrics and incorporates them into its decisions about which pages to display in search results..."

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Article: What is digital experience monitoring (DEM)?

"Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is software that enables organizations to track, discover, and optimize end-user experiences. DEM helps organizations observe the minute-by-minute experiences of their end users..."

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Whitepaper: 3 challenges of securing and connecting application services

"As businesses scale, maintaining optimal application performance and security becomes increasingly important — and difficult to ensure. Combating these issues — without slowing business operations — requires a more agile solution than either traditional hardware or multi-vendor, single-solution cloud services can provide..."

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Whitepaper: Optimize and secure your ecommerce business

"Online businesses are reaping the rewards of this digital-first mindset: by one estimation, ecommerce sales are likely to total over $6 trillion in 2023. That makes every click, every virtual shopping cart, and every online buying decision a crucial one..."

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Developer docs: Observatory

"Observatory uses synthetic tests and real user data from browsers to assess the performance of your website. These data sources produce metrics that provide different types of insights into your website's performance..."

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Developer docs: Digital Experience Monitoring

"Digital Experience Monitoring provides visibility into device, network, and application performance across your Zero Trust organization..."

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Developer docs: Cloudflare Web Analytics

"Cloudflare Web Analytics provides free, privacy-first analytics for your website without changing your DNS or using Cloudflare’s proxy. Cloudflare Web Analytics helps you understand the performance..."

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Application performance monitoring FAQs