As the IT world increasingly moves toward “single pane of glass” management consoles, customers are looking to understand:
 
■ How can these platforms enable true end-to-end monitoring and guaranteed infrastructure performance?

■ How will these platforms deal with the rise of cloud-based computing?
 
In 2016, consolidation of monitoring tools across five major platforms now accounts for more than 80 percent of the application monitoring market. In 2016, that percentage will continue to rise as environments become increasingly complex and the desire for "single pane of glass" monitoring increases, pushing IT departments to combine APM and holistic infrastructure monitoring.
 
In the coming year, the need for APM probes that are able to analyze both public and private cloud-based applications will become increasingly important as cloud computing continues its rise in popularity. This increased migration to the cloud will stem from the continued performance depreciation of legacy systems. For companies that continue to use existing infrastructure, there will be a need to supplement systems with native plugins and APM probes to mitigate latency and proactively identify potential problems across the network. 
 
Standalone APM tools that work only for a specific product or device will become increasingly less relevant as the industry continues to converge and consolidate and replaces these tools with native plug-in solutions. This effort will be driven by the need to lower administrative costs whilst increasing manageability in 2016.

Bogdan Viher is Product Director at Comtrade System Software and Tools.