Skip to main content

Impact of the Pandemic on APM

Application performance has become a key concern from management, more so than pre-pandemic, according to Application Performance Monitoring in the Next Normal, a report from December produced by eG Innovations and the DevOps Institute.

The key findings of the report include:

■ 41% of respondents indicate that APM tools have become significantly more important in the last year, as businesses are now more reliant on IT.

■ It took a pandemic to get a 19% of organizations to begin using an APM solution

■ Most organizations are dealing with fragmented monitoring tools. 74% are having to use 2 to 5 monitoring tools to get an end-to-end view of their applications and infrastructure.

■ 89% of respondents feel that converged application and infrastructure monitoring is necessary, but only 11% already have this capability deployed.

■ Respondents expect APM tools to be able to provide a single-pane-of-glass view across their IT landscape, including application, network, storage, cloud, etc.

■ 88% of organizations are already using cloud technologies. 67% have hybrid-cloud deployments. 28% of these have more than 50% of workloads in the cloud.

■ 95% of respondents have adopted or are considering microservices and DevOps technologies. Deployment of container technologies in the cloud is far more popular than in on-premises infrastructures.

■ 71% of respondents are unhappy with the level of monitoring provided by their cloud provider's monitoring solutions (Azure Monitor, Amazon CloudWatch, etc.).

There are many that believe that just because they are moving to the cloud, they don't have to worry about application performance. Our survey result dispels this myth

"We obtained several interesting insights from this survey. There are many that believe that just because they are moving to the cloud, they don't have to worry about application performance. Our survey result dispels this myth: almost 3 in 4 respondents are unhappy with native cloud monitoring tools. At the same time, many analysts have treated application and infrastructure monitoring as two different disciplines. Our survey shows that organizations are seeking unified solutions, ideally a single pane of glass from where they can track the health of the application and the underlying infrastructure," said Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO of eG Innovations.

Eveline Oehrlich, Chief Research Officer at DevOps Institute, who helped jointly conduct the survey added: "The viability of a company's brand and the ability of employees to serve customers and clients largely rests on the quality of experience they have with applications and services. Interruptions cannot be tolerated and must be pre-empted with intelligent automation such as APM - particularly in light of the ongoing digital transformation. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the digital business and has increased the unrelentless focus on the performance of these digital services and applications. The results of the survey show that APM has finally received the attention it requires from the leadership."

Methodology: The survey report is a compilation of responses from over 900 DevOps, SREs, Developers and ITOps professionals from across the world and includes learnings, analysis, and trends that will be useful for any IT professional responsible for managing or developing applications.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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? ...

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 ...

Impact of the Pandemic on APM

Application performance has become a key concern from management, more so than pre-pandemic, according to Application Performance Monitoring in the Next Normal, a report from December produced by eG Innovations and the DevOps Institute.

The key findings of the report include:

■ 41% of respondents indicate that APM tools have become significantly more important in the last year, as businesses are now more reliant on IT.

■ It took a pandemic to get a 19% of organizations to begin using an APM solution

■ Most organizations are dealing with fragmented monitoring tools. 74% are having to use 2 to 5 monitoring tools to get an end-to-end view of their applications and infrastructure.

■ 89% of respondents feel that converged application and infrastructure monitoring is necessary, but only 11% already have this capability deployed.

■ Respondents expect APM tools to be able to provide a single-pane-of-glass view across their IT landscape, including application, network, storage, cloud, etc.

■ 88% of organizations are already using cloud technologies. 67% have hybrid-cloud deployments. 28% of these have more than 50% of workloads in the cloud.

■ 95% of respondents have adopted or are considering microservices and DevOps technologies. Deployment of container technologies in the cloud is far more popular than in on-premises infrastructures.

■ 71% of respondents are unhappy with the level of monitoring provided by their cloud provider's monitoring solutions (Azure Monitor, Amazon CloudWatch, etc.).

There are many that believe that just because they are moving to the cloud, they don't have to worry about application performance. Our survey result dispels this myth

"We obtained several interesting insights from this survey. There are many that believe that just because they are moving to the cloud, they don't have to worry about application performance. Our survey result dispels this myth: almost 3 in 4 respondents are unhappy with native cloud monitoring tools. At the same time, many analysts have treated application and infrastructure monitoring as two different disciplines. Our survey shows that organizations are seeking unified solutions, ideally a single pane of glass from where they can track the health of the application and the underlying infrastructure," said Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO of eG Innovations.

Eveline Oehrlich, Chief Research Officer at DevOps Institute, who helped jointly conduct the survey added: "The viability of a company's brand and the ability of employees to serve customers and clients largely rests on the quality of experience they have with applications and services. Interruptions cannot be tolerated and must be pre-empted with intelligent automation such as APM - particularly in light of the ongoing digital transformation. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the digital business and has increased the unrelentless focus on the performance of these digital services and applications. The results of the survey show that APM has finally received the attention it requires from the leadership."

Methodology: The survey report is a compilation of responses from over 900 DevOps, SREs, Developers and ITOps professionals from across the world and includes learnings, analysis, and trends that will be useful for any IT professional responsible for managing or developing applications.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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? ...

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 ...