Original Article by Prince Sinha for Scout APM
Discipline is the key to success for all companies doing well in their field or reaching a trillion-dollar valuation. They manage the software and update it very frequently when it comes to providing services.
So how are they able to manage it and keep their software updated every moment? The answer is ALM—Application Lifecycle Management. ALM includes the people, the software, the tools, and the processes included in software development, from planning to deploying it for end customers. A company prepares an ALM to schedule the steps and timeline of software management in advance not to make decisions in the last hour.
Application lifecycle management includes steps like legal documentation, resources management, requirements management, risk management, software development, testing and quality assurance of the product, and maintenance and various micro-steps in between them. This post aims to provide you with a basic idea of understanding and implementing ALM in your project.
Application Performance Management(APM)
APM tools are essential ALM components for any business. APMs help you track and monitor the performance of your products—your applications. As a result, they directly affect the growth of your customer base and help you shape your products to gain the maximum out of them.
Scout APM is one of the best application performance management tools in the current market. It is a lightweight performance monitoring tool that helps analyze applications built using Ruby on Rails, Elixir, Python, PHP, and Node.js. Scout APM helps recognize and address your performance problems by integrating deep instrumentation with a rational, mature, and clutter-free UI.
Scout provides a developer-centric interface. It offers powerful monitoring capabilities and real-time alerting to keep you aware of what’s happening inside your applications. Additionally, Scout’s tracing is so accurate that it ties issues directly to the concerned line in the application’s source code, making your software team’s job very simple. Scout offers a 14-day (no credit card required) free trial, so check it out!
Dynatrace
Dynatrace uses machine learning for detecting and eradicating defects in the application. It researches any problem in performance to the deepest level and helps the user solve the issue faster. Due to its rich user interface, you can easily navigate each layer of the application and quickly solve errors. It also helps you to predict any incoming fatal issues.
New Relic
New Relic is a well-known APM in the industry. It provides finer details of the application, including the metrics of which feature is most catchy for the user and how much time a user spends on a particular feature. Its intuitive user interface is straightforward to use and accounts for a rich user experience. The UI helps users to see the performance levels rather than just numbers. Companies like HEARST, American Eagle, ABInBev, and H&R block rely on New Relic for their APM needs.
New Relic also offers over 368 third-party integrations such as Google cloud, Firestore, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Drupal, Akka, CakePHP, Codefusion, CodeIgniter, Cordova, etc.
AppDynamics
AppDynamics is an APM tool offered by Cisco that helps in application management, automated deployment, bug tracking, updates alerts, and much more. Their business IQ tool helps drill into the in-depth reason of any issue that impacts your business and allows your teams to schedule and prioritize their tasks accordingly.
Communication and Ticking
Communication software enables teams to constantly be in touch with one another, notify others of an emergency, and integrate various apps simultaneously, leading to better progress tracking product development.
Slack
Slack is an excellent app for communication within teams. If you are looking for conversations, brainstorming sessions, real-time audio and video chats, and a generous free plan to try it all out, then slack may be an excellent match for you. You can create separate channels for separate discussions such as features, bugs, clients, or non-work space. In addition, you can easily integrate apps like Scout, Github, Polly, Google Drive, etc.
Pricing:
Slack offers a variety of pricing options, ranging from free to enterprise, depending on business requirements. With a standard plan adding only a few additional dollars per person, slack is excellent for startups and small businesses.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft teams is one of the latest products from Microsoft. You can do group chat, video conferences, meetings, personal calls, and much more. Integrating other apps like one drive, notebook, and other Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps makes it easier to collaborate.
Pricing:
Microsoft teams offers 3 plans: free, basic, and standard. While it can work well for small and large businesses, its pricing plan is more stringent and less flexible than that of its competitor Slack.
Zoho Cliq
Zoho Cliq is another team collaboration tool for managing tasks, real-time messaging, adding external and guest users. With many features like file sharing, calendar, polls, integrating apps like Google Drive, Zoho CRM, Mailchimp, Twitter, etc., Cliq makes it easy to monitor business in real-time.
Pricing:
Zoho Cliq’s pricing package depends entirely on how many users you intend to have to utilize it. With plans ranging from small to very large, you’re sure to find a plan that works for your business needs.
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is a prominent market leader in conferencing apps. Many organizations use it for their daily online and real-time meetings. It’s mainly known for its live chat, screen share, real-time face-to-face calls, in addition to its fast, reliable, and fully secure environment.
Pricing:
The professional, business, and enterprise pricing plans offered by GoToMeeting range in price per organizer. Each tier offers a different range of features, so make sure that you know what you will and won’t be getting before picking a plan.
Surefront
Surefront is a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform that facilitates collaboration between cross-functional teams. Not only does it serve as a central repository and single source of truth for product data, but it also allows development teams to collaborate on products with object-oriented communications. Each object and page in Surefront has a patented built-in chat that helps keep continuity and context throughout the development process.
Pricing:
Surefront has product and pricing options to fit any team's needs: There's a team plan for companies with smaller teams and highly focused needs, a business plan that caters to companies with dozens of team members and cross-functional needs, and an enterprise plan that best suits large organizations with many team members and needs for more customization in their best fit solution.