2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

APMdigest's 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions is a forecast by the top minds in APM today. 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 2017. Part 3 covers the many aspects of IT services, including monitoring, incident management, end user experience and DevOps.

Start with 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

22. THE UNIFICATION OF MONITORING

In 2017 we will see leading APM solutions begin to increase capabilities in both the depth in which they can capture data and the velocity in which they can handle time series metrics. Today's solutions are fragmented between APM, metrics, logs, and infrastructure capture which creates visibility issues. Unification will be a key driver to free up engineering resources in most organizations utilizing monitoring.
Jonah Kowall
VP of Market Development and Insights, AppDynamics

IT departments will push for consolidated monitoring tools that include uptime monitoring, load monitoring, response time monitoring, and end-to-end application visibility in a single tool. They are frustrated with fragmented tool landscapes with different tools for every vendor and platform and with the finger-pointing that ensues. They will insist on unified tools that can detect application issues and that can easily trace the source of the problem down to the actual root cause in the underlying infrastructure.
Kimberley Parsons Trommler
Product Evangelist, Paessler AG

23. INCIDENT MANAGEMENT EXPANDS ROLE

The role of an incident management tool will shift from just being incident management, to also focusing on alerting, fixing and documenting issues. The impact of this will be that organizations understand more about their systems over time.
Jason Hand
DevOps Evangelist, VictorOps

Read Jason Hand's blog: DevOps for Crisis Communication: Five Steps to Prevent a Crisis from Becoming a Disaster

24. GOAL: CONTINUOUS AVAILABILITY

In today's world, having a disaster, with full failure, and then recovering from that disaster just doesn't cut it. Instead, 2017 will be the year organizations demand that IT deliver continuous availability. With continuous availability, you need to run operations across multiple systems, in multiple locations, simultaneously. Pieces of the system may fail, but system as a whole will not. Ensuring that applications will continue to run even if underlying components fail, including database servers, requires new architectures, and 2017 will see those architectures dominate.
Justin Barney
CEO, ScaleArc

25. GOAL: REDUCED TRANSACTION TIMES

Application performance, including scalability and transactional performance, is becoming more important as user expectations, even for internally facing applications, grow higher. No one wants to wait for 8 seconds and instead expects less than 1 second. CEO's are pushing their internal teams to drive down transaction times, which improve productivity across their companies.
Kevin Surace
CEO, Appvance

26. GOAL: SECURE USER EXPERIENCE

As more workloads migrate to cloud environments and new development techniques such as microservices and containerization take hold, more companies will recognize the strategic and financial benefits of implementing a unified approach to application performance and secure user experience (UX). Discrete monitoring technologies will continue to converge and leverage machine learning and advanced analytics to speed early detection of behavioral anomalies and facilitate rapid incident response. This is the direction of the The Secure UX Enterprise.
Gabe Lowy
Technology Analyst and Founder of TechTonics Advisors

Read Gabe Lowy's Blog: The Secure UX Enterprise

27. FOCUS ON THE QUALITY OF END USER EXPERIENCE

2017 is the year of application end user Quality of Experience (QoE). New tools, cloud architectures and strategies will mature beyond exploiting cloud for agility to a focus application development and delivery on delighting audiences.
Rob Malnati
VP of Marketing and Business Development, Cedexis

In my opinion, the digital transformation we've seen companies go through in the past years will continue at the same pace if not faster. IT will remain under the same pressure to deliver more value to market faster, always at a lower cost. What's new, is that this cannot be done at the expense of the quality of service any longer. Buggy mobile apps, slow web applications are not tolerated any longer. In the years to come, businesses will be forced to adopt a digital-customer-centric approach to IT Service and Application Performance Management, less focused on the health of the IT stack. Therefore we should continue seeing an increased adoption of the new generation APM and UEM solutions across all industries and verticals.
Vincent Geffray
Senior Director of Product Marketing, IT Alerting and IoT, Everbridge

28. APM TAKES ON DEVOPS

In 2017, APM solutions will need to focus on DevOps toolchain integration and be more dynamic than the microservice-based applications which are being managed. With these highly dynamic applications, 2017 will drive the need for cognitive analytics to be integrated with APM.
Randy George
IBM Distinguished Engineer - APM Architecture, IBM

29. LOW-CODE AND NO-CODE

The rise of low-code and no-code systems will allow APM to be integrated with system updates so that issues are not only flagged, but also resolved automatically. Performance metrics will start to focus on aspects of user experience such as response time, rather than technical indicators such as CPU utilization.
Colin Earl
CEO, Agiloft

30. OPTIMIZED MAINFRAME CODE

The mainframe is typically perceived as a transactional workhorse, but given the sheer number of transactions and users supported, slight tweaks in mainframe code can result in huge performance improvements for millions of users. With the advance of new solutions and tools it has become easier than ever to optimize previously untouchable mainframe code and improve user performance for transactional applications. We think this is an undiscovered opportunity mainframe stakeholders will be leveraging in 2017.
Spencer Hallman
Product Manager, Compuware

Read 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4.

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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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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 ...

2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

APMdigest's 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions is a forecast by the top minds in APM today. 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 2017. Part 3 covers the many aspects of IT services, including monitoring, incident management, end user experience and DevOps.

Start with 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

22. THE UNIFICATION OF MONITORING

In 2017 we will see leading APM solutions begin to increase capabilities in both the depth in which they can capture data and the velocity in which they can handle time series metrics. Today's solutions are fragmented between APM, metrics, logs, and infrastructure capture which creates visibility issues. Unification will be a key driver to free up engineering resources in most organizations utilizing monitoring.
Jonah Kowall
VP of Market Development and Insights, AppDynamics

IT departments will push for consolidated monitoring tools that include uptime monitoring, load monitoring, response time monitoring, and end-to-end application visibility in a single tool. They are frustrated with fragmented tool landscapes with different tools for every vendor and platform and with the finger-pointing that ensues. They will insist on unified tools that can detect application issues and that can easily trace the source of the problem down to the actual root cause in the underlying infrastructure.
Kimberley Parsons Trommler
Product Evangelist, Paessler AG

23. INCIDENT MANAGEMENT EXPANDS ROLE

The role of an incident management tool will shift from just being incident management, to also focusing on alerting, fixing and documenting issues. The impact of this will be that organizations understand more about their systems over time.
Jason Hand
DevOps Evangelist, VictorOps

Read Jason Hand's blog: DevOps for Crisis Communication: Five Steps to Prevent a Crisis from Becoming a Disaster

24. GOAL: CONTINUOUS AVAILABILITY

In today's world, having a disaster, with full failure, and then recovering from that disaster just doesn't cut it. Instead, 2017 will be the year organizations demand that IT deliver continuous availability. With continuous availability, you need to run operations across multiple systems, in multiple locations, simultaneously. Pieces of the system may fail, but system as a whole will not. Ensuring that applications will continue to run even if underlying components fail, including database servers, requires new architectures, and 2017 will see those architectures dominate.
Justin Barney
CEO, ScaleArc

25. GOAL: REDUCED TRANSACTION TIMES

Application performance, including scalability and transactional performance, is becoming more important as user expectations, even for internally facing applications, grow higher. No one wants to wait for 8 seconds and instead expects less than 1 second. CEO's are pushing their internal teams to drive down transaction times, which improve productivity across their companies.
Kevin Surace
CEO, Appvance

26. GOAL: SECURE USER EXPERIENCE

As more workloads migrate to cloud environments and new development techniques such as microservices and containerization take hold, more companies will recognize the strategic and financial benefits of implementing a unified approach to application performance and secure user experience (UX). Discrete monitoring technologies will continue to converge and leverage machine learning and advanced analytics to speed early detection of behavioral anomalies and facilitate rapid incident response. This is the direction of the The Secure UX Enterprise.
Gabe Lowy
Technology Analyst and Founder of TechTonics Advisors

Read Gabe Lowy's Blog: The Secure UX Enterprise

27. FOCUS ON THE QUALITY OF END USER EXPERIENCE

2017 is the year of application end user Quality of Experience (QoE). New tools, cloud architectures and strategies will mature beyond exploiting cloud for agility to a focus application development and delivery on delighting audiences.
Rob Malnati
VP of Marketing and Business Development, Cedexis

In my opinion, the digital transformation we've seen companies go through in the past years will continue at the same pace if not faster. IT will remain under the same pressure to deliver more value to market faster, always at a lower cost. What's new, is that this cannot be done at the expense of the quality of service any longer. Buggy mobile apps, slow web applications are not tolerated any longer. In the years to come, businesses will be forced to adopt a digital-customer-centric approach to IT Service and Application Performance Management, less focused on the health of the IT stack. Therefore we should continue seeing an increased adoption of the new generation APM and UEM solutions across all industries and verticals.
Vincent Geffray
Senior Director of Product Marketing, IT Alerting and IoT, Everbridge

28. APM TAKES ON DEVOPS

In 2017, APM solutions will need to focus on DevOps toolchain integration and be more dynamic than the microservice-based applications which are being managed. With these highly dynamic applications, 2017 will drive the need for cognitive analytics to be integrated with APM.
Randy George
IBM Distinguished Engineer - APM Architecture, IBM

29. LOW-CODE AND NO-CODE

The rise of low-code and no-code systems will allow APM to be integrated with system updates so that issues are not only flagged, but also resolved automatically. Performance metrics will start to focus on aspects of user experience such as response time, rather than technical indicators such as CPU utilization.
Colin Earl
CEO, Agiloft

30. OPTIMIZED MAINFRAME CODE

The mainframe is typically perceived as a transactional workhorse, but given the sheer number of transactions and users supported, slight tweaks in mainframe code can result in huge performance improvements for millions of users. With the advance of new solutions and tools it has become easier than ever to optimize previously untouchable mainframe code and improve user performance for transactional applications. We think this is an undiscovered opportunity mainframe stakeholders will be leveraging in 2017.
Spencer Hallman
Product Manager, Compuware

Read 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4.

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 ...