Practice APM vocabulary: APM agents, transactions, P95 latency, slow DB query spans, Datadog APM, New Relic, Dynatrace, and performance alerting.
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What does APM stand for?
APM (Application Performance Monitoring) is a category of tools that provide deep visibility into application performance — tracking transactions, latency, error rates, and infrastructure metrics in real time.
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What is an 'APM agent'?
An APM agent is instrumentation code (typically a library or auto-instrumentation agent) installed in the application. It captures transaction timings, SQL queries, HTTP calls, and sends this data to the APM platform.
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'The P95 ___ is 420ms.' Which noun is being measured?
'P95 latency' is the 95th percentile response time — the latency experienced by the slowest 5% of requests. 420ms at P95 means 95% of requests complete in under 420ms.
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'The APM shows a slow ___ query spans.' Which type of operation is highlighted?
'Slow DB query spans' in APM traces indicate database queries taking longer than expected. APM tools like Datadog automatically detect and flag queries above configured thresholds.
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'We set up an alert on P99 > ___.' Which latency threshold is standard for alerting in the example given?
'P99 > 2s' is a common APM alert threshold — if the 99th percentile latency exceeds 2 seconds, the alert fires. The exact value depends on your SLO; 2s is a reasonable starting point for API services.