Unresolved latency, failing API calls, and silent errors typically go unchecked until they impact revenue. You probably already know how hard it is to trace incidents across distributed systems when your observability setup falls short. The truth is that siloed data and limited tooling leave you reacting instead of preventing.
That’s why choosing the right partner for application performance monitoring and full-stack visibility matters. In this article, we’ll compare the leading agencies, weigh trade-offs, and see who’s built to support your eCommerce scale.
Let’s start with what these consulting services actually do.
Observability and APM consulting services help you monitor, analyze, and improve every part of your digital commerce stack, from the frontend storefront to backend services and database queries.
These services combine engineering expertise with the right tools to provide clear visibility into system behavior, track response times, and surface patterns before they impact performance. You get support with implementing dashboards, alerting, and distributed tracing so teams can move faster and with more accuracy.
Growth in this space is accelerating. According to Market Research Future, the full-stack observability market is projected to jump from $8.56 billion in 2025 to $49.26 billion by 2034. That’s a signal that many leaders like you are prioritizing stack visibility to protect both revenue and reputation.
Before comparing providers, let’s see where observability ends and APM begins, since the two usually overlap but serve different goals.
Observability gives you a full picture of system health by collecting and analyzing logs, metrics, traces, and events. APM focuses more narrowly on how individual apps or services behave.
Normally, observability helps your team understand why something is failing, especially across distributed systems. It connects symptoms to root causes, unlike surface-level alerts.
And according to 451 Research, observability platforms identify issues about 20% faster and resolve them 15% quicker than legacy tools. That’s a clear advantage when every second of latency can affect revenue.
Contrast that with APM, which tracks performance metrics, error rates, and transaction speeds to surface slowdowns or downtime.
But both types of tools are important. The key difference comes down to scale and scope, and together they help you improve visibility and speed up your response time.
For a more visual representation of the difference between observability and APM, check out this YouTube video:
Next, let’s look at what you actually gain when these two work in sync.
Performance issues frustrate users and directly impact revenue. As you know, digital teams in commerce operate under high stakes. Even a small delay creates a chain reaction across user experience, conversions, and retention.
That’s because slow sites can bounce users and even lose them forever. In fact, one study found that cutting page load by just one second can improve conversions by 5.6%.
But when load times stretch too far, the losses add up fast. Cart abandonment can jump by 75% on slow pages, and more than half of mobile visitors will leave if wait times cross the three-second mark.
Of course, speed and page load time are just one part of what observability and APM consulting are about. Here’s why working with the right consulting partner pays off:
Now let’s go over the part that you’ve been waiting for… the partners that are best equipped to help you get there.
Choosing a partner who understands your architecture and scale is key. Some bring deep application performance management expertise, while others focus on front-to-back visibility. Here are the agencies worth your attention.
Nova Cloud is a commerce-focused observability partner built to support complex eCommerce stacks. Our team delivers full monitoring, APM, and performance optimization across Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFRA and headless), and composable builds such as React or Next.js.
We combine deep platform expertise with custom instrumentation and dashboards, so we help you spot the real performance problems, whether it’s slow page loads, broken checkout flows, or backend errors. What makes us different is our close alignment with commerce needs and our nearshore delivery model that speeds up response and makes collaboration easier.
That same approach helped Finix reduce credit card transaction failures from 15% to under 1% and cut processing time to under one second within six weeks!
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Website: novacloud.io
Pricing: Custom quote.
2. Levi 9
Levi 9 positions itself as a strategic observability partner that supports developers, SREs, and IT operations teams. You get tool setup and guidance in applying telemetry practices and clarity in diagnosing issues.
Levi9 blends enterprise platforms such as Splunk Observability with open-source tools to help you connect logs, traces, and metrics for full-context visibility.
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Website: levi9.com
Pricing: Custom quote.
3. Grid Dynamics
Grid Dynamics brings an engineering focus to observability in high-scale commerce environments. Its strength lies in combining data pipelines with performance engineering and SRE practices.
Unlike tool-centric vendors, it integrates machine learning to catch anomalies in real time. This can help your teams act on telemetry before it affects key systems.
That’s especially useful if you’re managing large datasets or want tighter data integrity across analytics platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift, or BigQuery.
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Website: griddynamics.com
Pricing: Custom quote.
4. ThoughtWorks
ThoughtWorks builds observability into your larger cloud-native applications and DevOps strategy. Their work focuses on shifting teams from reactive monitoring to structured observability using telemetry data across all environments.
This company can help you rework how testers, developers, and SREs collaborate on platform health. If your team is rebuilding infrastructure or rolling out new CI/CD systems, they bring both technical and cultural alignment to the process.
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Website: thoughtworks.com
Pricing: Custom quote.
5. Valtech
Valtech mixes commerce strategy with strong digital performance and observability support. Their Valtech One platform includes AI content observability and tracks LLM prompt performance for content-heavy, headless setups.
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Website: valtech.com
Pricing: Custom quote.
6. Endava
Endava is a consulting partner that offers observability, performance optimization, and APM as part of broader digital commerce transformation programs, with a focus on real-time data insights.
They started in supply chains and asset-heavy industries, but they bring these practices into commerce environments too. If you need telemetry aligned with larger transformation goals, they offer a strong methodology.
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Website: endava.com
Pricing: Custom quote.
7. Contino.io
Contino treats observability as a strategic element of your cloud architecture and DevOps journey. Their proprietary “Observability River” model guides you from basic logs to full visibility, spanning synthetic monitoring, real-user signals, APM, and alerting. This company also helps you focus on aligning observability with business KPIs and compliance standards.
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Website: contino.io
Pricing: Custom quote.
8. DXC Technology
DXC brings full-stack observability and APM into cloud operations and app modernization for large-scale platforms. Their solution is built around Dynatrace and ServiceNow, using AI to connect logs, traces, metrics, and business KPIs. This helps shift your teams from a reactive approach to predictive, insight-driven operations.
The company used this model to help an oil and gas client cut app management costs by up to 40% and improve productivity and MTTR by 30%. This is a result of rolling out 150+ dashboards, full integration into CMDB and incident systems, and onboarding both ops and dev teams.
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Website: dxc.com/us/en
Pricing: Custom quote.
9. McKinsey & Company
McKinsey provides strategic guidance to improve operations. Observability and APM are treated as central to IT resilience, cloud migration, and commerce growth.
The company’s frameworks connect telemetry with uptime, end-user experience, and cloud ROI. Through QuantumBlack, they also address observability governance in AI systems, which adds visibility into agent behavior and traceability.
In fact, QuantumBlack began in 2009 as an independent data‑science firm working closely with Formula 1 teams to gain insights from high-volume telemetry. McKinsey acquired it in 2015, and today it’s McKinsey’s dedicated AI and advanced‑analytics arm, with over 1,000 data scientists, engineers, and AI specialists working globally. And this technology increased output by 20% across multiple sites.
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Website: mckinsey.com
Pricing: Custom quote.
10. Accenture
Accenture integrates observability and APM deeply into full-scale digital transformation programs. Through its partnership with Dynatrace and its Continuum Control Plane framework, the firm provides AI-driven, full-stack visibility.
This covers infrastructure, middleware, applications, and digital experience. You benefit from observability positioned as a strategic enabler supporting SRE practices, FinOps, and resilience in cloud architectures.
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Website: accenture.com
Pricing: Custom quote.
Finding the right observability partner means more than just hiring a monitoring vendor. You need someone who can improve visibility across your stack without adding overhead or complexity.
Here are the traits to prioritize when evaluating an agency:
The right partner should help you move from reactive troubleshooting to data-driven decision-making that cuts waste, sharpens deployment cycles, and improves uptime without guesswork.
Choosing the right observability partner directly impacts how fast you resolve issues and how much revenue you protect. With growing complexity in cloud applications, digital experience monitoring, and transaction tracing, generic dashboards won’t cut it. You need solutions that map directly to your stack, your users, and your KPIs.
That’s where Nova steps in. You get eCommerce-specific insight, fast incident response, and dashboards with system metrics that make real business sense.
If you’re serious about reducing downtime and improving performance where it matters most, schedule a call with Nova Cloud to see how the right observability strategy changes outcomes.
Observability helps you understand what’s happening across your stack in real time. APM focuses on performance metrics such as latency and throughput. Together, they let you detect and fix problems fast, reduce downtime, and protect revenue. This is important for distributed systems with heavy third-party API reliance.
Observability helps you see exactly where and why users leave your site. If checkout pages load slowly or an API call fails, you’ll catch it in real time. Tracking user interactions, load speed, and errors across the funnel allows you to fix issues before they impact more users. This leads to faster experiences and fewer abandoned carts, which means better conversion rates.
Teams often use Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Elastic Stack, or Azure Monitor for eCommerce observability. For richer insights, some combine these with custom instrumentation or OpenTelemetry.
It depends on your architecture. For most setups, initial visibility can take 1-2 weeks. Fine-tuning for incident management, alerting, and dashboards may take longer.
Yes, well-implemented observability can reduce cloud or infrastructure costs. If you track resource usage, you can identify overprovisioned services or inefficient containerized environments, which results in direct cost savings.