APMdigest asked the top minds in the industry what they feel is the most important way Application Performance Management (APM) tools must evolve. The recommendations on this list provide a rare look into the long-term future of APM technology. Part 4 covers the end user experience.
Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 1
Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 2
Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 3
16. END USER EXPERIENCE
In this era of digital transformation, delivering an exceptional end user experience is one of the most important goals for enterprises. APM must evolve into a unified monitoring solution that shows a clear linkage to the quality of the end user experience. Additionally, monitoring of the supporting infrastructure is another critical component in delivering the best overall experience to the end-users of the application.
Peter Kacandes
Senior Product Marketing Manager, AppDynamics
Because user experience is the new service level agreement standard, businesses must arm themselves with APM tools that natively provide end-to-end visibility into user experience across mobile, web and e-commerce platforms, monitoring and analyzing API calls, runtime environments, and business transactions in the context of user actions and their devices.
Monica Benjamin
Director of Product Marketing, HPE Software
Read Monica Benjamin's blog: APM Evolution - End User Experience
According to a recent Gartner survey, 46 percent of enterprises view end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) as the most important APM dimension, and 49 percent cite "enhance customer service quality" as their first choice for rationalizing APM purchases. Companies know the end-user experience impacts the bottom line, but they have trouble quantifying exactly how much. APM must evolve to enable not only better understanding of the end-user experience, but also the direct business impact of poor performance. This will drive future APM investments.
Dennis Callaghan
Director of Industry Innovation, Catchpoint
APM tools need to get as close as possible to the end users. That could mean putting them into mobile apps and browsers, running playback-bots, or implementing in-app customer feedback mechanisms. That's the most important way APM tools must evolve. Traditionally, APM tools have focused largely on monitoring internal, full app stacks inside the data center. Now, we're seeing more consolidation in the application development and deployment stack – for instance, AWS for hosting and NoSQL as the preferred database technology. That means APM tools will gradually shift from lower-level challenges (monitoring apps, servers, and databases) to higher-level ones. These new challenges would include things like a) understanding user behavior and tying it back to the application developers' world via time-based hooks and b) knowing that a new workflow is turning more Android users away than the previous flow. That kind of insight is what today's app developers should expect from an APM tool.
Dev Anand Ramasamy
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine
17. END-USER EXPERIENCE + ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
The APM tools today measure and expose the latency and availability of digital services. In order to offer the owners of these services a better overview and control of user experience, the APMs will need to add two additional dimensions to their dashboards – tracing of users and root cauuses. The APMs of tomorrow will have to monitor the experience of individual users and when the experience is not satisfying, expose root causes with the precision of a specific line in source code.
Ivo Mägi
Co-founder and Head of Product, Plumbr
18. DIGITAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Application Performance Management tools must evolve to become Digital Performance Management. As the definition of "application" is both expanding and becoming more vague, it's important for these tools to focus on the customer experience end-to-end. That's essentially what we mean by digital performance.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx
APM has historically been IT-centric, driven by operations and development, mainly to more efficiently identify and fix issues. However, this gives little or no thought to the digital customer experience. The most successful businesses are practicing what we call Digital Performance Management (DPM), using customer experience insights as a common language to foster collaboration and align priorities across these teams including business stakeholders. DPM collected analytics are uniquely positioned to help break silos by providing detailed insight around user behavior, delivered experience quality and the supporting applications and infrastructure health and performance across channels.
Erwan Paccard
Director of Customer Experience Marketing, Dynatrace
2016 will see the beginning of a mass transition from APM to DPM (Digital Performance Management) with emphasis on front-end performance measurement, testing and optimization based on analytics insights gained from the holy trinity of data - real user, business outcome and ops metrics.
Ann Ruckstuhl
CMO, SOASTA
19. APPLICATION-AWARE APM
The biggest evolution in application performance management will be application-aware solutions in the virtualized environment that tie the end user to the virtualized infrastructure that is delivering the application. As the management interface grows increasingly complex with virtual machines, hybrid cloud and hypervisor-based solutions, an evolution must take place to ensure that IT understands how their business critical applications are using compute, storage, network and virtualization resources on a user-by-user basis. As IT continues to evolve, monitoring solutions must also evolve to provide complete transparency throughout applications and all infrastructure layers.
Simon Taylor
President, Comtrade Software
Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 5, covering the impact of APM on the Business.