What is the purpose of Datadog's APM (Application Performance Monitoring)?

Datadog's APM, or Application Performance Monitoring, is designed primarily to optimize application performance by tracing requests as they flow through various services and components of an application. This capability allows users to gain insights into how requests are processed, identify bottlenecks, and understand the performance of individual services.

By tracing requests, APM provides detailed visibility into application latency, errors, and the duration of requests, which helps developers and operations teams pinpoint problems and optimize the performance of applications. This process ultimately leads to improved user experiences and efficient application management.

Monitoring network security, managing user permissions, and facilitating data backups pertain to other aspects of IT and security management that are not the focus of APM. While these functions are important for overall system health and security, they do not contribute directly to application performance monitoring, which is the specific goal of Datadog's APM solution.