Stuck on apm vs error monitoring? Both promise to catch problems, but they watch different things. Error monitoring shows you what broke for users and why, while APM shows you what is slow. Many teams run both.
For the bigger picture, the overview of error monitoring puts this comparison in context.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Error monitoring captures | Stack traces, OS, browser, time and date, headers |
| APM captures | Server-side performance metrics: response time, throughput, errors |
| Error monitoring setup | A small code snippet added to your app |
| APM setup | An agent installed on each server |
| User-level detail | Error monitoring ties errors to authenticated users |
These points come from Raygun’s December 2017 post and New Relic’s blog, last updated in January 2024. Vendor guidance ages and tools change, so check the source before you rely on the figures.
APM vs error monitoring: what each tool watches
Error monitoring watches for failures: exceptions and crashes in your code. Raygun, a vendor that calls this category crash reporting, says these tools give a granular view of software errors found in both front-end and back-end code.
Each report arrives with the context a developer needs to start debugging. Raygun lists the following details:
- Full stack traces
- The operating system and browser
- The time and date of the error
- Request headers
- Raw crash data
The same post says intelligent error grouping collects errors around their root cause, so a flood of identical failures does not become a flood of notifications.
APM, short for application performance monitoring, watches speed and health. New Relic’s blog says that through pre-configured alerts and visualizations, APM helps teams understand metrics like response time, throughput, and errors. TechTarget describes it as a tool to locate the source of application performance issues.
That gives APM a reach error monitoring lacks. Raygun notes that APM surfaces slow experiences that would never be spotted using crash reporting alone, because a slow page throws no exception.
What you see when a user has a bad day
Picture a customer whose checkout fails. An error monitoring tool records the exception and, according to Raygun, identifies which authenticated users hit it, so you can fix the errors touching the most people first.
APM answers from the other side. Raygun says APM dashboards retrospectively show error trends over time, but they do not promote that these are real problems experienced by customers. It adds that APM tools generally lack the deeper diagnostic information, such as the stack trace, that developers need to resolve errors. You can read both points in the Raygun comparison.
A quick way to choose the right tool for a question:
- Reach for error monitoring when you ask which code threw an exception, who was affected and whether a release made things worse.
- Reach for APM when you ask which part of the application is slow, how response time and throughput are trending, or what made a server unresponsive.
New Relic adds that APM works well for the questions or conditions you know to ask in advance. That fits routine performance checks, but it is a different job from catching an unexpected exception with its stack trace.
Setup and overhead
In Raygun’s December 2017 post, most APM tools on the market required an agent on each server you want to monitor. The post called that a convoluted process for an enterprise team running 50+ servers, and noted that agents are not free in terms of resource consumption. See the full post for the reasoning.
The same post says error monitoring may only need a small code snippet once you have installed the library. Raygun claims you could have it in production within minutes, since there is no agent to install. Treat that as one vendor’s view from 2017 and check current documentation for any tool you pick.
Once reports start flowing, the next job is deciding who hears about each failure, and the guide on how to set up error alerts covers that. Front-end stack traces are only useful when they are readable, and the guide on source maps error tracking explains how minified code is mapped back.
Where does observability fit?
You will often see APM mentioned next to observability. New Relic’s blog, last updated in January 2024, says APM is a subset of observability. It adds that observability also extends to data types like logs, events and traces.
TechTarget, in an article published in March 2025, offers a handy analogy. APM is similar to a car’s check engine light, telling the driver there is a problem. The same piece says APM tools generally do little to diagnose and correct it.
The labels also blur in the market. TechTarget says many vendors started as APM vendors but now include capabilities for both functions in their products. Judge a product by the data it gives you, not by the category on its homepage.
How to use both together
Raygun’s view is that the tools complement each other: many engineering teams do not choose one or the other, and use both. A sensible order of work looks like this:
- Add error monitoring first, so every exception arrives with a stack trace and user context.
- Add APM where server-side speed matters, to watch response time, throughput and errors.
- Connect the error tool to the places your team already works. Raygun names issue trackers like Jira, chat tools like Slack and repository software like GitHub.
- Turn on deployment tracking if your tool offers it. Raygun says its deployments feature correlates high error counts with deployments.
- When a user reports a problem, check whether the server caused any exceptions for that user during that time frame.
That last step is where the pairing pays off. Raygun says that when the two work together, you can also see which user actions caused the error, which saves time when you replicate and fix it.
One caveat on tooling: Raygun says some APM tools offer a crash reporting feature, but argues a dedicated tool is usually the best option for getting to the bottom of errors. That is a vendor’s opinion, so test any bundled error feature against your own failures.
Frequently asked questions
Is APM the same as error monitoring?
Show answer
No. Error monitoring records exceptions and crashes with debugging context, while APM tracks performance metrics such as response time and throughput. Both help you understand application health, but they answer different questions.
Do I need both APM and error monitoring?
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Not always on day one, but Raygun says many teams use both. Error monitoring covers what broke for users, and APM covers what is slow. Start with the gap that hurts you most.
Can APM replace error monitoring?
Show answer
Raygun says APM generally lacks deeper diagnostic detail like the stack trace, though some APM tools include a crash reporting feature. Check whether that feature gives you the stack traces and user context you need before you drop a dedicated tool.
Which one is quicker to set up?
Show answer
According to Raygun’s December 2017 post, error monitoring may need only a small code snippet, while most APM tools then required an agent on each server. Setup has likely changed since, so read each vendor’s current docs.
Where does observability come in?
Show answer
New Relic’s January 2024 post describes APM as a subset of observability. Observability also uses logs, events and traces, so it aims to explain why something happened, not only that it did.
