APM is crucial for ensuring critical business applications are available, resilient, and perform at peak levels. As businesses migrate more applications to the cloud, APM becomes even more important due to additional performance vectors in cloud-native or hybrid-cloud applications. Cloud application performance is a combination of factors that relate to availability and responsiveness but also to overall cost. Key metrics for cloud application performance include response time (RTT), latency, throughput, error rates, and resource utilization. Inadequate cloud application performance can lead to severe problems such as diminished user satisfaction, increased cart abandonment rates, loss of revenue, and damage to brand reputation. APM helps address these challenges by providing real-time insights into application behavior, identifying bottlenecks, monitoring proactively, and optimizing resources. APM solutions offer anomaly monitoring, in-depth analytics, distributed tracing, cloud-native support, and integrations with various technologies and frameworks. Real-time monitoring is a cornerstone of cloud APM, and APM can take advantage of synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), infrastructure monitoring, and other methods to collect data for tracking metrics, analytics, and diagnostics. APM encompasses a suite of tools and strategies to ensure consistent, reliable, and efficient cloud application performance, including enhanced reliability, improved scalability, and cost optimization. Leveraging APM within cloud environments requires proactive monitoring, scalability and flexibility, team collaboration, and continuous improvement. New Relic is an ideal solution for cloud APM due to its comprehensive suite of tools and technologies.