What does application performance monitoring assess?

Application performance monitoring (APM) focuses on assessing various aspects of an application’s performance, including its responsiveness from the perspective of users. Specifically, B highlights the importance of evaluating how well an internet-facing app responds to user queries and interactions. This includes monitoring factors such as load times, error rates, and transaction times to ensure that users experience optimal performance when accessing an application over the internet. APM tools provide visibility into application metrics that help organizations identify performance bottlenecks, optimize user experience, and ensure that services run smoothly.

The other options do not directly pertain to the primary functions of APM. Internal network security (A) relates to safeguarding the network rather than monitoring application performance. Employee productivity (C) is concerned with assessing how effectively employees are working, rather than how well an application performs. Hardware uptime (D) is about ensuring that physical devices operating the applications are functioning, which, while important, does not directly encapsulate the scope of application performance monitoring, which is focused specifically on the application itself.