2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Visions of the future for APM, AIOPS, Observability, Open Telemetry and more

The Holiday Season means it is time for APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, the most popular content on APMdigest, viewed by tens of thousands of people in the IT community around the world for more than a decade. 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 2022.

Despite the title, this predictions list is not only about APM. Throughout the year, APMdigest covers a variety of related technologies beyond APM, and this year's predictions list offers an equally broad scope of topics. In addition to APM, the related technologies covered include AIOps,Observability, OpenTelemetry, IT Service Management (ITSM), User Experience Management, and a relatively new hot topic, remote work and work from home (WFH).

Some of these predictions may come true in the next 12 months, while others may be just as valid but take several years to be realized. Still others may be wishful thinking or unbased fears. Several predictions even directly contradict each other. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers a timely and fascinating snapshot of what the IT industry and the APM market are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for 2022.

The predictions will be posted in 7 parts over the next two weeks, with separate lists of predictions for NPM and Cloud to follow after the holidays. Meanwhile, DEVOPSdigest is posting a series of DevOps and development-related predictions for 2022.

A forecast by the top minds in Application Performance Management today, here are the predictions. Part 1 covers Application Performance Management.

APM FOR THE CLOUD

In the beginning, the cloud made everything easier. However, cloud complexity has increased dramatically, and our approach to the cloud and application performance management must change in response. When it comes to the application stack, there is a daunting number of choices — which vendor and what to run. For compute, there are over 400 different instance types on AWS alone. Add on to that a hybrid solution, and the choices companies need to make to move their data and application explodes. Then, there's the question of managing cloud compute costs so they stay within budget. Future APM solutions will no longer be just about debugging and tuning on an application-by-application basis. The future of application performance management needs visibility and automation to manage your compute, software stack, and ensure that your costs are within budget.
Ashfaq Munshi
CEO, Pepperdata

Image removed.

APM SCALABILITY

The pandemic accelerated the trend towards the increasing scale of application environments being monitored by APM. In 2022 some of this increase will begin to normalize, but the new normal will be a steeper scale-up trajectory with greater variability in the monitored footprint because of the growing use of public and hybrid cloud technologies. This will require APM tools to flexibly scale themselves to handle the volume of telemetry, and therefore adopt the very same public and hybrid cloud technologies of the environments they monitor.
James Kao
Head of Engineering, APM, Broadcom

Scalability to handle the increasing complexity of evolving IT infrastructures will enable a single point of management across thousands of business services.
Andreas Reiss
Head of Product Management, AIOps, Broadcom

APM PAY-PER-USE

Application complexity will drive innovation in APM cost reduction, so you'll only pay for what you use.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

APM FALLS BEHIND

Siloed APM solutions will continue to fall behind tools that integrate multiple sources of performance data into a cohesive whole.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

APM HAS NO REACH

Unless they evolve to match today's digital wilderness, the value of agent-based APM will be questionable. 62% of organizations use at least one, if not more, multi-same-service platforms (e.g., multi-DNS or multi-CDN) to extend the reach of their services. Coupled with other evolutions such as the ability to embed compute and storage within 5G networks, as we are seeing in AWS Wavelength, traditional APM has no reach. It might be a scary thought, but APM approaches must consider larger, holistic, reachability-based touchpoints. This needs to encompass everything from local dev environments to extensions on users' laptops — because they all are a part of today's overall digital experience ecosystem.
Leo Vasiliou
Director of Product Marketing, Catchpoint

REACHABILITY IS THE NEW AVAILABILITY

Have you considered that reachability is the new availability? Why? Reachability is crucial for business because it asks, "What good is a brightly burning sun if its rays cannot reach you on the beach on a cloudy day?" Taking this to APM, "What good is a highly performing cloud if its service(s) cannot reach users where they are in the world?" The action-shaping, belief factors, which help "brain frame" a reshaped APM are: The Internet is your new network; the cloud is your new datacenter; CDN (and other third-party platforms) are your new racks and cabinets; slow performance is the new down; reachability is the new availability.
Leo Vasiliou
Director of Product Marketing, Catchpoint

APM BECOMES IRRELEVANT

Companies run ever more services in ever more places. This leads to increased decentralization and a division of engineering responsibilities. We'll see debugging requests become less useful at the holistic level than managing the aggregate performance of the entire system. While continuing to be useful to development teams, APM will become irrelevant for operations teams.
Tobias Kunze
CEO and Co-Founder, Glasnostic

APM IS DEAD

The death knell for APM tolls as OpenTelemetry adoption reaches critical mass.
Martin MaoCEO and Co-Founder, Chronosphere

APM CONVERGES WITH SECURITY

IT Central Station users predict that in the coming year, APMs will start to become more involved in the security realm. It seems like a natural fit that they should start playing into that space.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station, (soon to be PeerSpot)

APM CONVERGES WITH AIOPS

Application performance monitoring has withstood the test of time in a sector that's always transitioning, but it is not without challenges. Application performance monitoring has adjusted itself to match the emerging trends to keep its place anchored in the industry. Isn't that ironic? In 2022, APM will evolve again to suit the capricious palate of the IT industry and this time, the focal point will be AIOps. DevOps admins spend a great deal of man-hours and wasteful energy on tracking various metrics and troubleshooting issues. The increased synergy between AIOps and APM systems can substantially lower the time and energy spent on identifying performance visibility gaps and detecting anomalies, and as a corollary, that can be diverted into accelerating innovation across the software development lifecycle.
Arun Balachandran
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine

Go to: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2, covering AIOps predictions.

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Performance bottlenecks aren't uncommon when it comes to rolling out new technology, regardless of how capable or game-changing that technology might be. Every generation of new tech has encountered roadblocks that had to be overcome before it was truly able to shine. Virtualization forced organizations to rethink resource allocation, cloud transformation had us shift our focus toward scalability and elasticity, and microservices introduced entirely new challenges around observability and distributed systems. There's something different about AI, however ...

What Capital Markets Can Teach Enterprises About Integrated Data Infrastructure

Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

Why AI in IT Is Producing High Productivity but Heavy Workloads

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

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Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

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Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

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If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

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Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

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2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Visions of the future for APM, AIOPS, Observability, Open Telemetry and more

The Holiday Season means it is time for APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, the most popular content on APMdigest, viewed by tens of thousands of people in the IT community around the world for more than a decade. 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 2022.

Despite the title, this predictions list is not only about APM. Throughout the year, APMdigest covers a variety of related technologies beyond APM, and this year's predictions list offers an equally broad scope of topics. In addition to APM, the related technologies covered include AIOps,Observability, OpenTelemetry, IT Service Management (ITSM), User Experience Management, and a relatively new hot topic, remote work and work from home (WFH).

Some of these predictions may come true in the next 12 months, while others may be just as valid but take several years to be realized. Still others may be wishful thinking or unbased fears. Several predictions even directly contradict each other. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers a timely and fascinating snapshot of what the IT industry and the APM market are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for 2022.

The predictions will be posted in 7 parts over the next two weeks, with separate lists of predictions for NPM and Cloud to follow after the holidays. Meanwhile, DEVOPSdigest is posting a series of DevOps and development-related predictions for 2022.

A forecast by the top minds in Application Performance Management today, here are the predictions. Part 1 covers Application Performance Management.

APM FOR THE CLOUD

In the beginning, the cloud made everything easier. However, cloud complexity has increased dramatically, and our approach to the cloud and application performance management must change in response. When it comes to the application stack, there is a daunting number of choices — which vendor and what to run. For compute, there are over 400 different instance types on AWS alone. Add on to that a hybrid solution, and the choices companies need to make to move their data and application explodes. Then, there's the question of managing cloud compute costs so they stay within budget. Future APM solutions will no longer be just about debugging and tuning on an application-by-application basis. The future of application performance management needs visibility and automation to manage your compute, software stack, and ensure that your costs are within budget.
Ashfaq Munshi
CEO, Pepperdata

Image removed.

APM SCALABILITY

The pandemic accelerated the trend towards the increasing scale of application environments being monitored by APM. In 2022 some of this increase will begin to normalize, but the new normal will be a steeper scale-up trajectory with greater variability in the monitored footprint because of the growing use of public and hybrid cloud technologies. This will require APM tools to flexibly scale themselves to handle the volume of telemetry, and therefore adopt the very same public and hybrid cloud technologies of the environments they monitor.
James Kao
Head of Engineering, APM, Broadcom

Scalability to handle the increasing complexity of evolving IT infrastructures will enable a single point of management across thousands of business services.
Andreas Reiss
Head of Product Management, AIOps, Broadcom

APM PAY-PER-USE

Application complexity will drive innovation in APM cost reduction, so you'll only pay for what you use.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

APM FALLS BEHIND

Siloed APM solutions will continue to fall behind tools that integrate multiple sources of performance data into a cohesive whole.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

APM HAS NO REACH

Unless they evolve to match today's digital wilderness, the value of agent-based APM will be questionable. 62% of organizations use at least one, if not more, multi-same-service platforms (e.g., multi-DNS or multi-CDN) to extend the reach of their services. Coupled with other evolutions such as the ability to embed compute and storage within 5G networks, as we are seeing in AWS Wavelength, traditional APM has no reach. It might be a scary thought, but APM approaches must consider larger, holistic, reachability-based touchpoints. This needs to encompass everything from local dev environments to extensions on users' laptops — because they all are a part of today's overall digital experience ecosystem.
Leo Vasiliou
Director of Product Marketing, Catchpoint

REACHABILITY IS THE NEW AVAILABILITY

Have you considered that reachability is the new availability? Why? Reachability is crucial for business because it asks, "What good is a brightly burning sun if its rays cannot reach you on the beach on a cloudy day?" Taking this to APM, "What good is a highly performing cloud if its service(s) cannot reach users where they are in the world?" The action-shaping, belief factors, which help "brain frame" a reshaped APM are: The Internet is your new network; the cloud is your new datacenter; CDN (and other third-party platforms) are your new racks and cabinets; slow performance is the new down; reachability is the new availability.
Leo Vasiliou
Director of Product Marketing, Catchpoint

APM BECOMES IRRELEVANT

Companies run ever more services in ever more places. This leads to increased decentralization and a division of engineering responsibilities. We'll see debugging requests become less useful at the holistic level than managing the aggregate performance of the entire system. While continuing to be useful to development teams, APM will become irrelevant for operations teams.
Tobias Kunze
CEO and Co-Founder, Glasnostic

APM IS DEAD

The death knell for APM tolls as OpenTelemetry adoption reaches critical mass.
Martin MaoCEO and Co-Founder, Chronosphere

APM CONVERGES WITH SECURITY

IT Central Station users predict that in the coming year, APMs will start to become more involved in the security realm. It seems like a natural fit that they should start playing into that space.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station, (soon to be PeerSpot)

APM CONVERGES WITH AIOPS

Application performance monitoring has withstood the test of time in a sector that's always transitioning, but it is not without challenges. Application performance monitoring has adjusted itself to match the emerging trends to keep its place anchored in the industry. Isn't that ironic? In 2022, APM will evolve again to suit the capricious palate of the IT industry and this time, the focal point will be AIOps. DevOps admins spend a great deal of man-hours and wasteful energy on tracking various metrics and troubleshooting issues. The increased synergy between AIOps and APM systems can substantially lower the time and energy spent on identifying performance visibility gaps and detecting anomalies, and as a corollary, that can be diverted into accelerating innovation across the software development lifecycle.
Arun Balachandran
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine

Go to: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2, covering AIOps predictions.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Performance Bottleneck in Enterprise AI Has Been Exposed – Now We Must Fix It

Performance bottlenecks aren't uncommon when it comes to rolling out new technology, regardless of how capable or game-changing that technology might be. Every generation of new tech has encountered roadblocks that had to be overcome before it was truly able to shine. Virtualization forced organizations to rethink resource allocation, cloud transformation had us shift our focus toward scalability and elasticity, and microservices introduced entirely new challenges around observability and distributed systems. There's something different about AI, however ...

What Capital Markets Can Teach Enterprises About Integrated Data Infrastructure

Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

Why AI in IT Is Producing High Productivity but Heavy Workloads

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

Implementing AI Isn't the Hard Part Anymore - Adoption Is

Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

The Incident Load Is Rising, but Recovery Times Aren't Moving

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

Your AI Pipeline May Have a Document Observability Problem

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

The SIEM Isn't the Problem. Your Telemetry Architecture Is

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...