Cloud application performance management (CAPM) is the monitoring of resources that support application program performance in private and hybrid cloud environments.
Application performance management (APM) involves the supervision of applications to ensure optimal performance and availability. As distributed IT environments have grown more complex, IT departments have increasingly turned to a more network-centered approach for application performance management (APM), using tools that bridge application and infrastructure silos and display application activity across a range of platforms in a single dashboard view. Such tools can be specific to a particular application or monitor multiple applications, collecting data about client CPU utilization, memory demands, data throughput and bandwidth.
The change to a more distributed network architecture has inspired vendors to increase the performance monitoring capabilities of networked applications. In a private or hybrid cloud computing environment, the transparency an APM tool provides allows a network administrator to identify the source of a performance faster. Some tools even include predictive components to alert the administrator as to where potential problems exist and prescriptive components to automate a solution. In a public cloud environment, a CAPM tool can be tightly coupled with a hosted application to provide an administrator with better insight into their end users' experience.