Legacy Application Performance Management (APM) vs Modern Observability - Part 1

Colin Fallwell
Sumo Logic
Learn more about Sumo Logic

In this 3 part series, I will explore, contrast, and discuss the differences as well as the history of APM and the meteoric rise of Modern Observability, why these two are related but simultaneously are vastly different in outcome. Indeed, Modern Observability is disrupting the world, and organizations doing it right are realizing massive gains in innovation, reaping the benefits of higher performance and optimization across numerous dimensions including:

■ IT governance

■ Revenue growth

■ Vendor cost reduction

■ Tool Consolidation

■ DevOps toil and churn

■ Application performance and customer experiences

■ Reliability and Security

■ Employee satisfaction

■ Data Science and Business Analytics

■ AI-controlled automation (AIOps)

Modern Observability is becoming the foundation upon which organizations are able to reduce the toil and churn associated with capital spending across initiatives such as Cloud Migrations, App Modernization, Digital Transformation, and AIOps by leveraging new methodologies such as Observability-Driven-Development (ODD).

Traditional APM is a mature, vendor-led industry, and was built at a time when the world was developing monolithic, 3-tier architectures and when software was typically released once or twice a year. APM is a closed ecosystem, with patented protocols and agents which are deployed to run on every node, injected into runtimes with startup parameters, and have little to no impact on how software is designed or developed.

This is a good thing, right?

In contrast to Modern Observability, and for organizations moving to the cloud, APM is loaded with hidden costs and unintended consequences. From a process perspective, APM does not live within the developer ecosystem and has historically been funded by Ops teams or DevOps/SRE groups that have largely been out of the immediate workstream of software development. This nuance means developers have no real ownership interest in APM and don't feel compelled in taking responsibility for declaring what it means to make something "observable." What enterprises desire most are reliable pipelines of telemetry that provide accurate data inferring the internal state of systems including usage and behavioral insights of end-users, code execution, infrastructure health, and overall performance. Most developers have been poor adopters of APM.

A major characteristic of Modern Observability is in how it becomes designed into the fabric of the applications, services, and infrastructure by DevOps teams, implemented through models such as GitOps, which in turn provides numerous benefits to organizations that legacy APM really does not align to. It is within this point of view or context that I base my opinions on throughout this series. Many organizations still relying on APM vendors will struggle to increase the intrinsic value of data within the organization. It's my firm argument that the most important attribute of Modern Observability lies in its "programmable" nature, whereby the acquisition of telemetry becomes woven into the fabric of developing software and the services offered by anyone competing in this global software-driven economy.

There are many other dimensions of contrast, but I personally believe this to be the most important with respect to organizations embracing digital transformation, or for those that just want to improve maturity, growth, and innovation, or anyone wishing to own their own destiny when it comes to data intelligence.

In the next installment (Part 2) of this series, we dive into the history of APM and how it became a 6 Billion USD market and explore some of the challenges that come with APM.

Colin Fallwell is Field CTO of Sumo Logic

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Legacy Application Performance Management (APM) vs Modern Observability - Part 1

Colin Fallwell
Sumo Logic
Learn more about Sumo Logic

In this 3 part series, I will explore, contrast, and discuss the differences as well as the history of APM and the meteoric rise of Modern Observability, why these two are related but simultaneously are vastly different in outcome. Indeed, Modern Observability is disrupting the world, and organizations doing it right are realizing massive gains in innovation, reaping the benefits of higher performance and optimization across numerous dimensions including:

■ IT governance

■ Revenue growth

■ Vendor cost reduction

■ Tool Consolidation

■ DevOps toil and churn

■ Application performance and customer experiences

■ Reliability and Security

■ Employee satisfaction

■ Data Science and Business Analytics

■ AI-controlled automation (AIOps)

Modern Observability is becoming the foundation upon which organizations are able to reduce the toil and churn associated with capital spending across initiatives such as Cloud Migrations, App Modernization, Digital Transformation, and AIOps by leveraging new methodologies such as Observability-Driven-Development (ODD).

Traditional APM is a mature, vendor-led industry, and was built at a time when the world was developing monolithic, 3-tier architectures and when software was typically released once or twice a year. APM is a closed ecosystem, with patented protocols and agents which are deployed to run on every node, injected into runtimes with startup parameters, and have little to no impact on how software is designed or developed.

This is a good thing, right?

In contrast to Modern Observability, and for organizations moving to the cloud, APM is loaded with hidden costs and unintended consequences. From a process perspective, APM does not live within the developer ecosystem and has historically been funded by Ops teams or DevOps/SRE groups that have largely been out of the immediate workstream of software development. This nuance means developers have no real ownership interest in APM and don't feel compelled in taking responsibility for declaring what it means to make something "observable." What enterprises desire most are reliable pipelines of telemetry that provide accurate data inferring the internal state of systems including usage and behavioral insights of end-users, code execution, infrastructure health, and overall performance. Most developers have been poor adopters of APM.

A major characteristic of Modern Observability is in how it becomes designed into the fabric of the applications, services, and infrastructure by DevOps teams, implemented through models such as GitOps, which in turn provides numerous benefits to organizations that legacy APM really does not align to. It is within this point of view or context that I base my opinions on throughout this series. Many organizations still relying on APM vendors will struggle to increase the intrinsic value of data within the organization. It's my firm argument that the most important attribute of Modern Observability lies in its "programmable" nature, whereby the acquisition of telemetry becomes woven into the fabric of developing software and the services offered by anyone competing in this global software-driven economy.

There are many other dimensions of contrast, but I personally believe this to be the most important with respect to organizations embracing digital transformation, or for those that just want to improve maturity, growth, and innovation, or anyone wishing to own their own destiny when it comes to data intelligence.

In the next installment (Part 2) of this series, we dive into the history of APM and how it became a 6 Billion USD market and explore some of the challenges that come with APM.

Colin Fallwell is Field CTO of Sumo Logic

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

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 ...

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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 ...

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 ...