2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2016. Part 4 covers networking and NPM (Network Performance Management).

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

INTEGRATING APM AND NPM

APM providers have almost uniformly focused on the application and application stack for performance management. As applications become more service-oriented, often times splitting apps between different data centers, or with a hybrid approach between a between a traditional data center and the cloud--network becomes a key to application performance. This is particularly true for the largest organizations where they are moving single applications or parts of applications out of their standard data centers and into the cloud. And of course the end user sits at the other end of a potentially very wide network. The key question for IT and DevOps will be: how can I get visibility into application performance when my infrastructure and user base are distributed? 2016 will be the year we'll see APM move to measure both application and network performance from the end user, through the network, to the application, down to the code.
Dan Kuebrich
CTO, AppNeta

APM is becoming a key and integral part of the management and orchestration of virtualized network architectures designed to deliver agility and elasticity to application services. SDN and NFV along with cloud technologies are advancing to the point where APM capabilities are essential. APM needs to be integrated into the analytics, heuristics, orchestration, and automation necessary to create the self-aware, self-healing, closed loop network ecosystem. Expect to see more consolidation and integration of the APM marketplace with the more traditional network management community.
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware

2016 could finally be the right time for the large portion of application performance that's dependent on the efficiency of the network interconnecting the many servers involved in delivering typical enterprise application services to be realistically included in the overall APM monitoring picture. This will necessitate the inclusion of active network path discovery and change monitoring as the inherent redundancy in modern networks leads to a lack of clarity in determining which devices, ports and links are actually responsible for providing the server, hypervisor and VM interconnections at any given time. This has been largely ignored by the monitoring industry till now because it's a difficult nut to crack and many of the attempted approaches to address it have proved unwieldy and prohibitively expensive to deploy. Recent breakthroughs have opened the door to plugging this gap in the APM story.
John Diamond
Principal Solutions Architect, Entuity

INTEGRATING APM, NPM AND SECURITY

Over the last five years, the lines between APM, NPM, and security have become sharper, with separate disciplines, analyses, and implementation. This independence has led to rapid improvements in user-perceivable performance and in infrastructure efficiency at some cost in complexity and security. In 2016, there will be new connections between the management of applications, networking, and security, enabling each of them to make essential contributions to the critical business requirement of "secure application performance."
Larry Zulch
President, Savvius

AANPM PROVIDES A NETWORK-LEVEL PERSPECTIVE

Application-aware network performance management will move away from starting at the per-user or device-by-device level to beginning with the entire network level, then identifying end-user performance issues from inside or outside of the enterprise, and following guided workflows for analysis and mediation.
Ulrica de Fort-Menarees
VP of Product Strategy, LiveAction

SDN WILL NOT CATCH ON YET

I predict that, despite the considerable hype, SDN will continue to not have a real effect on our user base. While we received many inquiries from customers about SDN and how to monitor it, SDN adoption is and will remain slow, especially at small and midsized companies. Implementing SDN means completely restructuring the existing IT infrastructure. Personnel have to be trained and "old" hardware must be updated, which comes at a significant cost. A project of this scope would certainly interfere with regular business processes for a long while, and at a questionable gain. While large enterprises may go down this path, with the benefit of large IT teams and external consultants, it is not feasible for most. In the same way that other IT trends have been absorbed over the years, so will SDN. Perhaps years from now, IT leaders at smaller companies will begin to think seriously about SDN. By that time, the cost-benefit analysis may make more sense than it does today. But for 2016, SDN enthusiasts will still have to wait.
Dirk Paessler
CEO, Paessler AG

Software-defined networks (SDN) will continue to be discussed, debated, and highly regarded, but it will still not be broadly implemented. In fact, the same traditional network hardware that worked in 2015 will continue to work in 2016.
Johnnie Konstantas
Director, Security Solutions Marketing & Business Development, Gigamon

MONITORING-AWARE NETWORKS COME ONLINE

SDN has matured significantly over the past few years, and among our customers and others we're starting to see it gain real traction. The next evolution of SDN is monitoring-aware networks. As demand for greater visibility into these networks escalates, expect to see hardware-agnostic vendors build commodity capture interfaces directly into device firmwares, enabling much easier, more agile monitoring of these complex and dynamic architectures.
Eric Thomas
Director of Solutions Architecture, ExtraHop

APM TAKES ON HYBRID IT

Hybrid IT has gone mainstream thanks to the distributed architecture's lowered capex and greater service agility. But the real challenge will come in 2016 as IT teams look for ways to ensure the new complexities that arise with hybrid IT do not negatively impact service delivery. In 2016, application performance management solutions will need to integrate monitoring capabilities that validate acceptable customer-experience metrics and reduce Mean Time to Resolution when anomalies do occur, independent of host location. Examples of new capabilities include combining cloud-based operational metrics from vendors like AWS with packet-level data from the network links that connect them to internally hosted system and end-users to ensure peak performance is achieved. Companies have undoubtedly now embraced the vision of "anywhere IT" resource deployment: legacy, cloud, and everything in between. The benefits and cost-savings are there for the taking but without the correct visibility into the infrastructure, enterprises will never realize the full benefits of hybrid IT.
Brad Reinboldt
Senior Product Manager, Viavi Solutions

Read 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5, the final installment.

Related Links

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The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...

2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2016. Part 4 covers networking and NPM (Network Performance Management).

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

INTEGRATING APM AND NPM

APM providers have almost uniformly focused on the application and application stack for performance management. As applications become more service-oriented, often times splitting apps between different data centers, or with a hybrid approach between a between a traditional data center and the cloud--network becomes a key to application performance. This is particularly true for the largest organizations where they are moving single applications or parts of applications out of their standard data centers and into the cloud. And of course the end user sits at the other end of a potentially very wide network. The key question for IT and DevOps will be: how can I get visibility into application performance when my infrastructure and user base are distributed? 2016 will be the year we'll see APM move to measure both application and network performance from the end user, through the network, to the application, down to the code.
Dan Kuebrich
CTO, AppNeta

APM is becoming a key and integral part of the management and orchestration of virtualized network architectures designed to deliver agility and elasticity to application services. SDN and NFV along with cloud technologies are advancing to the point where APM capabilities are essential. APM needs to be integrated into the analytics, heuristics, orchestration, and automation necessary to create the self-aware, self-healing, closed loop network ecosystem. Expect to see more consolidation and integration of the APM marketplace with the more traditional network management community.
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware

2016 could finally be the right time for the large portion of application performance that's dependent on the efficiency of the network interconnecting the many servers involved in delivering typical enterprise application services to be realistically included in the overall APM monitoring picture. This will necessitate the inclusion of active network path discovery and change monitoring as the inherent redundancy in modern networks leads to a lack of clarity in determining which devices, ports and links are actually responsible for providing the server, hypervisor and VM interconnections at any given time. This has been largely ignored by the monitoring industry till now because it's a difficult nut to crack and many of the attempted approaches to address it have proved unwieldy and prohibitively expensive to deploy. Recent breakthroughs have opened the door to plugging this gap in the APM story.
John Diamond
Principal Solutions Architect, Entuity

INTEGRATING APM, NPM AND SECURITY

Over the last five years, the lines between APM, NPM, and security have become sharper, with separate disciplines, analyses, and implementation. This independence has led to rapid improvements in user-perceivable performance and in infrastructure efficiency at some cost in complexity and security. In 2016, there will be new connections between the management of applications, networking, and security, enabling each of them to make essential contributions to the critical business requirement of "secure application performance."
Larry Zulch
President, Savvius

AANPM PROVIDES A NETWORK-LEVEL PERSPECTIVE

Application-aware network performance management will move away from starting at the per-user or device-by-device level to beginning with the entire network level, then identifying end-user performance issues from inside or outside of the enterprise, and following guided workflows for analysis and mediation.
Ulrica de Fort-Menarees
VP of Product Strategy, LiveAction

SDN WILL NOT CATCH ON YET

I predict that, despite the considerable hype, SDN will continue to not have a real effect on our user base. While we received many inquiries from customers about SDN and how to monitor it, SDN adoption is and will remain slow, especially at small and midsized companies. Implementing SDN means completely restructuring the existing IT infrastructure. Personnel have to be trained and "old" hardware must be updated, which comes at a significant cost. A project of this scope would certainly interfere with regular business processes for a long while, and at a questionable gain. While large enterprises may go down this path, with the benefit of large IT teams and external consultants, it is not feasible for most. In the same way that other IT trends have been absorbed over the years, so will SDN. Perhaps years from now, IT leaders at smaller companies will begin to think seriously about SDN. By that time, the cost-benefit analysis may make more sense than it does today. But for 2016, SDN enthusiasts will still have to wait.
Dirk Paessler
CEO, Paessler AG

Software-defined networks (SDN) will continue to be discussed, debated, and highly regarded, but it will still not be broadly implemented. In fact, the same traditional network hardware that worked in 2015 will continue to work in 2016.
Johnnie Konstantas
Director, Security Solutions Marketing & Business Development, Gigamon

MONITORING-AWARE NETWORKS COME ONLINE

SDN has matured significantly over the past few years, and among our customers and others we're starting to see it gain real traction. The next evolution of SDN is monitoring-aware networks. As demand for greater visibility into these networks escalates, expect to see hardware-agnostic vendors build commodity capture interfaces directly into device firmwares, enabling much easier, more agile monitoring of these complex and dynamic architectures.
Eric Thomas
Director of Solutions Architecture, ExtraHop

APM TAKES ON HYBRID IT

Hybrid IT has gone mainstream thanks to the distributed architecture's lowered capex and greater service agility. But the real challenge will come in 2016 as IT teams look for ways to ensure the new complexities that arise with hybrid IT do not negatively impact service delivery. In 2016, application performance management solutions will need to integrate monitoring capabilities that validate acceptable customer-experience metrics and reduce Mean Time to Resolution when anomalies do occur, independent of host location. Examples of new capabilities include combining cloud-based operational metrics from vendors like AWS with packet-level data from the network links that connect them to internally hosted system and end-users to ensure peak performance is achieved. Companies have undoubtedly now embraced the vision of "anywhere IT" resource deployment: legacy, cloud, and everything in between. The benefits and cost-savings are there for the taking but without the correct visibility into the infrastructure, enterprises will never realize the full benefits of hybrid IT.
Brad Reinboldt
Senior Product Manager, Viavi Solutions

Read 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5, the final installment.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...