APM and Observability: Cutting Through the Confusion — Part 7

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

APM and Observability are often utilized by different teams within an organization, though there is considerable overlap, according to Arun Balachandran, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions.

Start with: APM and Observability - Cutting Through the Confusion - Part 6

In Part 7, the experts examine the different roles in IT and how they use either APM and Observability, or both:

APPLICATION OWNERS: DEV AND ITOPS

APM tools, with their guided interfaces and focus on specific application metrics, are often used directly by application developers, operations teams, and sometimes even product managers to understand application health and user experience.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Software Engineer, OllyGarden

APM is owned primarily by the application owners and developers, who typically have some latitude over how to monitor their specific applications.
Paul Appleby
CEO, Virtana

APM tools are usually used by teams responsible for developing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. This typically entails software developers, SREs, and QA and performance testing teams.
Douglas James
VP, Solutions & Ecosystem, ScienceLogic

DEVELOPERS

APM tends to be the go-to for developers, application support, and QA professionals focused on application performance and behavior. 
Arun Balachandran
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions

APM is a more focused tool for application developers, and while application developers also use observability, other roles also make use of observability. 
Chrystal Taylor
Tech Evangelist, SolarWinds

APM offers granular insights at the code level, such as transaction tracing and end-user monitoring, which are indispensable for developers tackling application-specific challenges. These capabilities are foundational for diagnosing and resolving issues within the application layer.
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

The Tech Radar 2025 notes how developers experimenting with observability feel more empowered because it gives them the insight and autonomy to debug and optimize systems independently, not just escalate tickets.
Brian Douglas
Head of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

DEVOPS

Observability is more commonly in the hands of site reliability engineers, DevOps, and platform teams who oversee the overall health and stability of complex, distributed systems. As DevOps practices continue to mature and responsibilities shift further left, these roles are increasingly converging. Today, it's common for engineers across these functions to leverage both APM and observability tools to ensure seamless deployment and smooth operations.
Arun Balachandran
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions

Historically, APM and observability have been used in different roles. APM was used more by operations/monitoring teams, while observability was used more by developers/DevOps. However, this division is eroding as DevOps practices take hold and operational complexity increases. The shift from segregated to unified operational responsibility mirrors the broader IT evolution.
Jeff Cobb
Global Head of Product & Design, Chronosphere

SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEERS AND PLATFORM ENGINEERS

Observability practices, requiring deeper interaction with raw data, query languages, and system-wide context, tend to be the domain of more specialized roles like Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) or dedicated observability platform teams who need to perform deeper, more exploratory investigations.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Software Engineer, OllyGarden

SREs and platform engineers harness observability for cross-system visibility. Observability's holistic view is a game-changer for managing modern, distributed systems ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
Varma Kunaparaju
SVP and GM for Cloud Platform and OpsRamp Software, HPE

Observability tools are designed to support SRE-based management objectives focused on error budgets as opposed to generating unneeded alerts. As an example, if a cluster is nearing capacity, should an alert be generated? For traditional IT Ops, this would be a typical alert. However, for SREs and developers already struggling with alert fatigue, there should not be an alert created as the Kubernetes pod should auto scale. The SRE and developer focus should be on what is occurring if this autoscaling is failing when the application error budget is consumed.
Harald Burose
Director, Product Management, Research & Development – Engineering, OpenText

ITOPS

APM is typically used by the business and infrastructure monitoring teams. However, the utilization of more user-friendly observability tools with OpenTelemetry allows the ITOps teams to use the same data with the correlated logs and metrics aligned to traces to triage issues and route appropriately (is it a code issue or a 3rd party latency?) and still allows developers and SREs to use existing toolsets where they have experience.
Harald Burose
Director, Product Management, Research & Development – Engineering, OpenText

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL

The roles in these spaces are fluid to begin with. I have yet to see two SREs in two different organizations with the same job description. Different organizations will have different operational models due to different team structures, team resourcing, tech stacks, etc.
Sven Delmas
VP of Research, Mezmo

Developers have gravitated towards APM, while operations and site reliability engineers (SREs) have focused on observability. However, as collaboration becomes more critical and systems grow increasingly interconnected, these roles are converging. Teams now require tools that foster a shared understanding and provide insights that transcend individual roles, enhancing collective efficacy. Observability's integration with GenAI further supports this convergence by providing a shared language and insights across roles.
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

A lot depends on your team's maturity, scale, personnel and organization. You might have a very large and clearly-delineated team, whereby the microservices team running a D-APM tool, is somewhat removed or walled-off from the database team that's running a database observability tool. Or the mobile client applications team might be far removed from the networking observability team. But in smaller organizations you might need to be a "jack-of-all-trades." Or at a larger organization you might be at that senior role and when those escalations occur, you need to be familiar with drilling down into any system across your organization, using whatever APM or observability tools your team has to troubleshoot, diagnose and resolve the most complex, urgent, bottom-line-impacting and pernicious of problems.
Peter Corless
Director, Product Marketing, StarTree

Platforms that unify telemetry data enable any team member to investigate issues without requiring specialized expertise in multiple tools.
Rakesh Gupta
Head of Product Management, Observe

Go to: APM and Observability: Cutting Through the Confusion — Part 8, exploring whether you need APM, Observability or both.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

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APM and Observability: Cutting Through the Confusion — Part 7

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

APM and Observability are often utilized by different teams within an organization, though there is considerable overlap, according to Arun Balachandran, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions.

Start with: APM and Observability - Cutting Through the Confusion - Part 6

In Part 7, the experts examine the different roles in IT and how they use either APM and Observability, or both:

APPLICATION OWNERS: DEV AND ITOPS

APM tools, with their guided interfaces and focus on specific application metrics, are often used directly by application developers, operations teams, and sometimes even product managers to understand application health and user experience.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Software Engineer, OllyGarden

APM is owned primarily by the application owners and developers, who typically have some latitude over how to monitor their specific applications.
Paul Appleby
CEO, Virtana

APM tools are usually used by teams responsible for developing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. This typically entails software developers, SREs, and QA and performance testing teams.
Douglas James
VP, Solutions & Ecosystem, ScienceLogic

DEVELOPERS

APM tends to be the go-to for developers, application support, and QA professionals focused on application performance and behavior. 
Arun Balachandran
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions

APM is a more focused tool for application developers, and while application developers also use observability, other roles also make use of observability. 
Chrystal Taylor
Tech Evangelist, SolarWinds

APM offers granular insights at the code level, such as transaction tracing and end-user monitoring, which are indispensable for developers tackling application-specific challenges. These capabilities are foundational for diagnosing and resolving issues within the application layer.
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

The Tech Radar 2025 notes how developers experimenting with observability feel more empowered because it gives them the insight and autonomy to debug and optimize systems independently, not just escalate tickets.
Brian Douglas
Head of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

DEVOPS

Observability is more commonly in the hands of site reliability engineers, DevOps, and platform teams who oversee the overall health and stability of complex, distributed systems. As DevOps practices continue to mature and responsibilities shift further left, these roles are increasingly converging. Today, it's common for engineers across these functions to leverage both APM and observability tools to ensure seamless deployment and smooth operations.
Arun Balachandran
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions

Historically, APM and observability have been used in different roles. APM was used more by operations/monitoring teams, while observability was used more by developers/DevOps. However, this division is eroding as DevOps practices take hold and operational complexity increases. The shift from segregated to unified operational responsibility mirrors the broader IT evolution.
Jeff Cobb
Global Head of Product & Design, Chronosphere

SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEERS AND PLATFORM ENGINEERS

Observability practices, requiring deeper interaction with raw data, query languages, and system-wide context, tend to be the domain of more specialized roles like Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) or dedicated observability platform teams who need to perform deeper, more exploratory investigations.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Software Engineer, OllyGarden

SREs and platform engineers harness observability for cross-system visibility. Observability's holistic view is a game-changer for managing modern, distributed systems ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
Varma Kunaparaju
SVP and GM for Cloud Platform and OpsRamp Software, HPE

Observability tools are designed to support SRE-based management objectives focused on error budgets as opposed to generating unneeded alerts. As an example, if a cluster is nearing capacity, should an alert be generated? For traditional IT Ops, this would be a typical alert. However, for SREs and developers already struggling with alert fatigue, there should not be an alert created as the Kubernetes pod should auto scale. The SRE and developer focus should be on what is occurring if this autoscaling is failing when the application error budget is consumed.
Harald Burose
Director, Product Management, Research & Development – Engineering, OpenText

ITOPS

APM is typically used by the business and infrastructure monitoring teams. However, the utilization of more user-friendly observability tools with OpenTelemetry allows the ITOps teams to use the same data with the correlated logs and metrics aligned to traces to triage issues and route appropriately (is it a code issue or a 3rd party latency?) and still allows developers and SREs to use existing toolsets where they have experience.
Harald Burose
Director, Product Management, Research & Development – Engineering, OpenText

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL

The roles in these spaces are fluid to begin with. I have yet to see two SREs in two different organizations with the same job description. Different organizations will have different operational models due to different team structures, team resourcing, tech stacks, etc.
Sven Delmas
VP of Research, Mezmo

Developers have gravitated towards APM, while operations and site reliability engineers (SREs) have focused on observability. However, as collaboration becomes more critical and systems grow increasingly interconnected, these roles are converging. Teams now require tools that foster a shared understanding and provide insights that transcend individual roles, enhancing collective efficacy. Observability's integration with GenAI further supports this convergence by providing a shared language and insights across roles.
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

A lot depends on your team's maturity, scale, personnel and organization. You might have a very large and clearly-delineated team, whereby the microservices team running a D-APM tool, is somewhat removed or walled-off from the database team that's running a database observability tool. Or the mobile client applications team might be far removed from the networking observability team. But in smaller organizations you might need to be a "jack-of-all-trades." Or at a larger organization you might be at that senior role and when those escalations occur, you need to be familiar with drilling down into any system across your organization, using whatever APM or observability tools your team has to troubleshoot, diagnose and resolve the most complex, urgent, bottom-line-impacting and pernicious of problems.
Peter Corless
Director, Product Marketing, StarTree

Platforms that unify telemetry data enable any team member to investigate issues without requiring specialized expertise in multiple tools.
Rakesh Gupta
Head of Product Management, Observe

Go to: APM and Observability: Cutting Through the Confusion — Part 8, exploring whether you need APM, Observability or both.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

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 ...