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2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 7: User Experience

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 7 covers the end-user experience.

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

USER EXPERIENCE OVER APPLICATION METRICS

Observability teams will realize the importance of understanding user experience versus application metrics. The fact that a database call has a slightly longer wait time will become less critical than if the application is not meeting the user's expectations of performance. This will directly link resilience and performance back to business impact as a poor user experience can lead to lost revenue.
Gerardo Dada
CMO, Catchpoint

Image removed.

CONVERTING USER EXPERIENCE INTO METRICS

Improvements in multi-model generative AI will continue changing the way the industry looks at digital experience management (DEM), like converting actual user experience recordings into reportable analytics/metrics.
Camden Swita
Senior Product Manager, New Relic

INCORPORATING USER EXPERIENCE METRICS INTO DEV

User experience metrics will be further incorporated into the development and testing lifecycle.
Gerardo Dada
CMO, Catchpoint

INCREASING PRESSURE FOR SEAMLESS USER EXPERIENCE

In 2024 there will be increasing pressure for businesses to provide a seamless experience and intuitive responses that can be maintained during web traffic surges, especially in the ecommerce sector. Ecommerce traffic growth continues to rise year over year, which means businesses need to look at unleashing bandwidth capacity and start investing in reliable, scalable and agile web hosting services and infrastructure that won't compromise speed or functionality. Businesses can avoid paying more for bandwidth if technology is implemented to automatically dial up bandwidth capacity when a surge in traffic is detected. This will ensure their websites remain active and responsive. Companies should also focus on optimizing mobile-friendly websites, boosting customer service, and focus on the power of personalization.
Over the next year, ecommerce will see an increase in website traffic as younger generations age and are introduced to the various ways to purchase products online. It's crucial that businesses within the ecommerce sector properly prepare their websites and overall cloud and web hosting services.
Suhaib Zaheer
SVP, Managed Services, DigitalOcean

The growth of mobile ecommerce means that in 2024, more consumers will expect a seamless, personalized, and convenient shopping experience on their mobile devices. Businesses will need to optimize their websites and apps for mobile, offer various payment options and delivery methods, and leverage data and automation to create engaging and relevant content for their customers.
Kevin French
Principal, Client Solutions, BairesDev

PROACTIVE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE MONITORING

As Gartner reported, 47% of users experience significant digital friction on a daily basis. Thus, proactive employee experience monitoring (DEX) will become a main priority as companies realize the importance of ensuring connectivity and access to applications employees need to do their jobs effectively in 2024.
Gerardo Dada
CMO, Catchpoint

SECURITY DISRUPTS EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Zero-day patches, security tool updates, application updates, driver updates, and more, are compromising the user experience every day. Nearly 75% of CISOs say that employees in their organization are frustrated with current security policies that are taking a toll on their productivity. As companies continue implementing these layered security protocols to safeguard their systems, users will increasingly encounter friction in their daily work interactions. This growing user dissatisfaction could pose a significant risk to organizations' employee retention, and as we move into 2024, we will see workers be more reluctant to tolerate cumbersome software updates, patches, and security measures that hinder their ability to work efficiently. Organizations will need to take a holistic approach that does not compromise security nor the end-user experience to keep their employees happy. This requires tools that help them monitor end-user satisfaction and productivity, and understand the impact of frequent, disruptive updates on their users.
Amitabh Sinha
CEO, Workspot

IMPROVING REMOTE DIGITAL EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Regardless of what the overall mix will be, we have made a lasting shift to hybrid work because it's a critical tool for the recruitment and retention of top talent in a stubbornly tight labor market. To support remote teams, 88% of IT leaders will use the next 12-18 months to invest in tools that improve the digital employee experience of remote workers. IT teams will leverage observability tools to be sure that an anomaly is localized to a specific application or location and not a harbinger of a coming network crisis.
Mike Marks
VP Product Marketing, Riverbed

REMOTE WORK HINGES ON APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

As remote work becomes the norm for businesses worldwide, the paradigm shift brings forth critical considerations for application performance. The majority of business and software development activities now occur outside traditional office settings, necessitating hyper-connected and intricate networks for security. To address this, future solutions must prioritize resiliency, uptime, and shorter Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In addition, organizations will rely on automated troubleshooting of business outages. Failing to do so could prompt users and customers to explore alternative solutions that guarantee seamless software delivery. In this evolving landscape, the success of remote work hinges on the ability of applications to perform flawlessly, prompting a reevaluation of network architectures and performance standards to meet the demands of a distributed workforce.
Erez Tadmor
Cybersecurity Evangelist, Tufin

REMOTE WORK DRIVES APPLICATION CONSOLIDATION

In 2024, organizations will hone in on app consolidating and secure delivery. The pandemic ushered in the new norm of remote work, along with a massive influx of new cloud-based apps, mobile devices and laptops. In the rush to implement these solutions, a secondary layer of management, monitoring and security tools added to the complexity for both end users and IT. In 2024, businesses will hone in on consolidating access layers and centralizing management to address the abundance of old and new applications across diverse devices.
Sridhar Mullapudi
GM, Citrix

In Episode 2 of the MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA, discusses the network management impacts of remote work.

Click here for a direct MP3 download of Episode 2

Go to: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 8, covering NetOps and Network Performance Management (NPM).

The Latest

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 7: User Experience

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 7 covers the end-user experience.

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

USER EXPERIENCE OVER APPLICATION METRICS

Observability teams will realize the importance of understanding user experience versus application metrics. The fact that a database call has a slightly longer wait time will become less critical than if the application is not meeting the user's expectations of performance. This will directly link resilience and performance back to business impact as a poor user experience can lead to lost revenue.
Gerardo Dada
CMO, Catchpoint

Image removed.

CONVERTING USER EXPERIENCE INTO METRICS

Improvements in multi-model generative AI will continue changing the way the industry looks at digital experience management (DEM), like converting actual user experience recordings into reportable analytics/metrics.
Camden Swita
Senior Product Manager, New Relic

INCORPORATING USER EXPERIENCE METRICS INTO DEV

User experience metrics will be further incorporated into the development and testing lifecycle.
Gerardo Dada
CMO, Catchpoint

INCREASING PRESSURE FOR SEAMLESS USER EXPERIENCE

In 2024 there will be increasing pressure for businesses to provide a seamless experience and intuitive responses that can be maintained during web traffic surges, especially in the ecommerce sector. Ecommerce traffic growth continues to rise year over year, which means businesses need to look at unleashing bandwidth capacity and start investing in reliable, scalable and agile web hosting services and infrastructure that won't compromise speed or functionality. Businesses can avoid paying more for bandwidth if technology is implemented to automatically dial up bandwidth capacity when a surge in traffic is detected. This will ensure their websites remain active and responsive. Companies should also focus on optimizing mobile-friendly websites, boosting customer service, and focus on the power of personalization.
Over the next year, ecommerce will see an increase in website traffic as younger generations age and are introduced to the various ways to purchase products online. It's crucial that businesses within the ecommerce sector properly prepare their websites and overall cloud and web hosting services.
Suhaib Zaheer
SVP, Managed Services, DigitalOcean

The growth of mobile ecommerce means that in 2024, more consumers will expect a seamless, personalized, and convenient shopping experience on their mobile devices. Businesses will need to optimize their websites and apps for mobile, offer various payment options and delivery methods, and leverage data and automation to create engaging and relevant content for their customers.
Kevin French
Principal, Client Solutions, BairesDev

PROACTIVE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE MONITORING

As Gartner reported, 47% of users experience significant digital friction on a daily basis. Thus, proactive employee experience monitoring (DEX) will become a main priority as companies realize the importance of ensuring connectivity and access to applications employees need to do their jobs effectively in 2024.
Gerardo Dada
CMO, Catchpoint

SECURITY DISRUPTS EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Zero-day patches, security tool updates, application updates, driver updates, and more, are compromising the user experience every day. Nearly 75% of CISOs say that employees in their organization are frustrated with current security policies that are taking a toll on their productivity. As companies continue implementing these layered security protocols to safeguard their systems, users will increasingly encounter friction in their daily work interactions. This growing user dissatisfaction could pose a significant risk to organizations' employee retention, and as we move into 2024, we will see workers be more reluctant to tolerate cumbersome software updates, patches, and security measures that hinder their ability to work efficiently. Organizations will need to take a holistic approach that does not compromise security nor the end-user experience to keep their employees happy. This requires tools that help them monitor end-user satisfaction and productivity, and understand the impact of frequent, disruptive updates on their users.
Amitabh Sinha
CEO, Workspot

IMPROVING REMOTE DIGITAL EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Regardless of what the overall mix will be, we have made a lasting shift to hybrid work because it's a critical tool for the recruitment and retention of top talent in a stubbornly tight labor market. To support remote teams, 88% of IT leaders will use the next 12-18 months to invest in tools that improve the digital employee experience of remote workers. IT teams will leverage observability tools to be sure that an anomaly is localized to a specific application or location and not a harbinger of a coming network crisis.
Mike Marks
VP Product Marketing, Riverbed

REMOTE WORK HINGES ON APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

As remote work becomes the norm for businesses worldwide, the paradigm shift brings forth critical considerations for application performance. The majority of business and software development activities now occur outside traditional office settings, necessitating hyper-connected and intricate networks for security. To address this, future solutions must prioritize resiliency, uptime, and shorter Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In addition, organizations will rely on automated troubleshooting of business outages. Failing to do so could prompt users and customers to explore alternative solutions that guarantee seamless software delivery. In this evolving landscape, the success of remote work hinges on the ability of applications to perform flawlessly, prompting a reevaluation of network architectures and performance standards to meet the demands of a distributed workforce.
Erez Tadmor
Cybersecurity Evangelist, Tufin

REMOTE WORK DRIVES APPLICATION CONSOLIDATION

In 2024, organizations will hone in on app consolidating and secure delivery. The pandemic ushered in the new norm of remote work, along with a massive influx of new cloud-based apps, mobile devices and laptops. In the rush to implement these solutions, a secondary layer of management, monitoring and security tools added to the complexity for both end users and IT. In 2024, businesses will hone in on consolidating access layers and centralizing management to address the abundance of old and new applications across diverse devices.
Sridhar Mullapudi
GM, Citrix

In Episode 2 of the MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA, discusses the network management impacts of remote work.

Click here for a direct MP3 download of Episode 2

Go to: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 8, covering NetOps and Network Performance Management (NPM).

The Latest

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...