Gartner's recently released Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring is one of the best reports to read if you want to get a handle on the future of the APM industry.
Jonah Kowall, Research Director, IT Operations Management at Gartner, answered the following four quick questions from APMdigest about the new report:
APM: During our interview in June, I asked "How do you rate the industry overall, in terms of the vendors' ability to deliver SaaS?" At the time you could not comment on the research in progress. Now that the Magic Quadrant for APM is out, what is your take on the maturity of the vendors with regard to SaaS?
JK: Pretty immature in general, but it's an area of rapid change. Most vendor solutions which are SaaS enabled focus on the commoditized and lower value synthetic transaction end user experience monitoring.
Additionally, most have not been designed to be portable to other service providers (think of a public cloud provider looking to add value added services), or offer self-service signup and management by the customer. This will start to become more pervasive in SaaS offerings.
APM: Which APM vendors are leaders in terms of a SaaS option - APM-as-a-Service?
JK: Enterprises have been consuming SaaS APM in the form of synthetic transactions for quite a while, and many organizations haven't evolved beyond that point.
That being said, there are 3 main slices of vendors in the synthetic testing area, the high end, middle tier, and low end. I will provide some example vendors in each:
High: Compuware, Keynote
Medium: Smartbear, Nustar, ManageEngine
Low: Pingdom, Monitis, Alertfox
There are many more here, but these are examples.
When looking at full-featured APM solutions, there are really only two right now who are offering a vendor-hosted APM SaaS product: AppDynamics and New Relic. The other folks have partial functionality in a SaaS deployment model, but like I said this will be changing.
Other APM products are deployed in MSP environments, specifically to service the MSPs customers.
APM: The new requirements for this year's APM Magic Quadrant - such as offering all 5 dimensions of APM, as well as a SaaS option - cut out a few vendors from the report. What is the potential for these vendors to be included in next year's Magic Quadrant?
JK: We only had a couple on the fence and they were due to SaaS capabilities and not meeting all five dimensions. There are at least a couple who will qualify for the research in 2013, if they execute their planned roadmaps. The same can be said for the few missing SaaS capabilities.
APM: I know it is early, but do you have any hints for us on any new requirements for next year?
JK: We have thoughts on this, some of which is outlined above - delivery models, partnerships or self-service. But we haven’t nailed anything down yet, and probably will not until late January. We will likely publish a note with the criteria changes for 2013 soon after that to get people thinking.
New requirements could also entail delivery of more than a single APM dimension as a service, which would eliminate most of the vendors if that were a requirement today.
Related Links:
Gartner Publishes Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring
Gartner's Five Dimensions of APM
Another Look At Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM
Q&A Part One: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About APM Cool Vendors
Q&A Part Two: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About SaaS APM
Q&A Part Three: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About Application Performance Management