John Rakowski from Forrester: 10 Must-Have APM Capabilities

During APMdigest's exclusive interview last month, John Rakowski, Forrester Analyst & Advisor Serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals, outlined 10 must-have capabilities to look for when you are purchasing an Application Performance Management (APM) solution. Not included with the rest of the interview, here is the list published for the first time:

1. Simplicity

Complexity kills. Complexity in any monitoring solution is not going to provide value. So first and foremost any recommendation that I make is that simple is beautiful. Solutions must be simple to deploy quickly, simple to use, simple to access.

2. Collect All Data

APM solutions must be able to record data rapidly and store economically. You need to be able to record all data. It used to be that monitoring solutions would sample data every five minutes, or even every minute. That is too slow now. You need to be collecting all data.

3. Automation

APM solutions must automatically learn and understand what is important to the environment, in terms of the people, process and technology perspective. It is no good having the operator define this. Because of the rapid return you need to get from APM, these solutions need to be able to learn about the environment.

4. Integration

An APM solution is not going to be the only solution you invest in. A good monitoring approach is to have various products in a monitoring stack – infrastructure monitoring, network performance monitoring. So a good APM solution needs to be able to integrate easily with other monitoring solutions. An open API is a must here.

5. Single Source of the Truth

APM solutions must promote cooperation, and a single source of truth. Your APM solution must be a single source of truth for application performance and availability. And it is not just about traditional understanding of performance and availability. It is also about making sure that these applications are delivering the right customer experience.

6. Search

APM solutions should be collecting all data, so they must make it easy to search through that data.

7. Flexible Dashboards

APM solutions must make it easy to display information in context – whether it is to the business or IT. This requires the capability to easily create dashboards for multiple users.

8. Freemium Model

APM solutions must be available to try for free. I am a big advocate of the “freemium” model. For any APM solution, it is very hard to understand what value you are going to get from that solution in a trial period of 30 days.

9. Integration with Automation Solutions

Solutions must be able to trigger responses to situations rapidly, so integration with automation solutions is important.

10. Focus on Business

APM solutions must focus on business outcomes first, and technology second.

ABOUT John Rakowski

John Rakowski serves Infrastructure & Operations Professionals. He has eight years of experience in the technology and consulting industry, with certifications from Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, BMC, and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). At Forrester, his
research focuses on service management strategy, adoption, and implementation. In particular, Rakowski helps IT leaders and their teams understand the business value of service management, develop their strategy, evaluate and select vendor tools, and implement service management processes such as ITIL. Additionally, Rakowski focuses on the organizational impact of service management and its relationship to broader IT trends such as cloud computing.

Prior to joining Forrester in 2011, Rakowski was a solution architect for Fujitsu specializing in enterprise management. He has provided consultancy to a number of organizations in both the public and private sector and across different verticals ranging from the financial sector to not-for-profit charities. Some notable examples of his past clients are Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, KPMG, and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). He has also been a certified trainer delivering systems management courses on behalf of Microsoft. Working out of Forrester's London office, John holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in business information technology from Manchester Metropolitan University.

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John Rakowski from Forrester: 10 Must-Have APM Capabilities

During APMdigest's exclusive interview last month, John Rakowski, Forrester Analyst & Advisor Serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals, outlined 10 must-have capabilities to look for when you are purchasing an Application Performance Management (APM) solution. Not included with the rest of the interview, here is the list published for the first time:

1. Simplicity

Complexity kills. Complexity in any monitoring solution is not going to provide value. So first and foremost any recommendation that I make is that simple is beautiful. Solutions must be simple to deploy quickly, simple to use, simple to access.

2. Collect All Data

APM solutions must be able to record data rapidly and store economically. You need to be able to record all data. It used to be that monitoring solutions would sample data every five minutes, or even every minute. That is too slow now. You need to be collecting all data.

3. Automation

APM solutions must automatically learn and understand what is important to the environment, in terms of the people, process and technology perspective. It is no good having the operator define this. Because of the rapid return you need to get from APM, these solutions need to be able to learn about the environment.

4. Integration

An APM solution is not going to be the only solution you invest in. A good monitoring approach is to have various products in a monitoring stack – infrastructure monitoring, network performance monitoring. So a good APM solution needs to be able to integrate easily with other monitoring solutions. An open API is a must here.

5. Single Source of the Truth

APM solutions must promote cooperation, and a single source of truth. Your APM solution must be a single source of truth for application performance and availability. And it is not just about traditional understanding of performance and availability. It is also about making sure that these applications are delivering the right customer experience.

6. Search

APM solutions should be collecting all data, so they must make it easy to search through that data.

7. Flexible Dashboards

APM solutions must make it easy to display information in context – whether it is to the business or IT. This requires the capability to easily create dashboards for multiple users.

8. Freemium Model

APM solutions must be available to try for free. I am a big advocate of the “freemium” model. For any APM solution, it is very hard to understand what value you are going to get from that solution in a trial period of 30 days.

9. Integration with Automation Solutions

Solutions must be able to trigger responses to situations rapidly, so integration with automation solutions is important.

10. Focus on Business

APM solutions must focus on business outcomes first, and technology second.

ABOUT John Rakowski

John Rakowski serves Infrastructure & Operations Professionals. He has eight years of experience in the technology and consulting industry, with certifications from Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, BMC, and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). At Forrester, his
research focuses on service management strategy, adoption, and implementation. In particular, Rakowski helps IT leaders and their teams understand the business value of service management, develop their strategy, evaluate and select vendor tools, and implement service management processes such as ITIL. Additionally, Rakowski focuses on the organizational impact of service management and its relationship to broader IT trends such as cloud computing.

Prior to joining Forrester in 2011, Rakowski was a solution architect for Fujitsu specializing in enterprise management. He has provided consultancy to a number of organizations in both the public and private sector and across different verticals ranging from the financial sector to not-for-profit charities. Some notable examples of his past clients are Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, KPMG, and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). He has also been a certified trainer delivering systems management courses on behalf of Microsoft. Working out of Forrester's London office, John holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in business information technology from Manchester Metropolitan University.

Related Links

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The Latest

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

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