The Holiday Season is the time for the annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, the most popular content on APMdigest, viewed by tens of thousands of people in the IT community around the world every year. Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2018.
APMdigest covers a variety of related technologies beyond APM, and this year's predictions list does the same. In addition to APM, the related technologies covered include IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) also called Advanced IT Analytics (AIA), IT Service Management (ITSM), End-User Experience Management (EUEM), Network Performance Management (NPM), as well as infrastructure monitoring.
The 2018 APM Predictions List is the longest predictions list ever featured on APMdigest. Last year's list featured 50 prediction categories, while this year's list features 60 categories. This extensive list of predictions reflects the vast scope of digital transformation accompanied by the continuously changing IT landscape.
Some of these predictions may come true in the next 12 months, while others may be just as valid but take several years to be realized. Still others may be wishful thinking or unbased fears. Some predictions even directly conflict with each other. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers a timely and engrossing snapshot of what the IT industry and the APM market are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for next year.
The predictions will be posted in 7 parts over the next few weeks.
A forecast by the top minds in Application Performance Management today, here are the predictions:
SINGLE PANE OF GLASS
Based on 315+ reviews of APM solutions on IT Central Station, the feature that many of our community members expect from their APM solution is a single pane of glass. In 2018, APM vendors who continue to build-out their single pane of glass functionalities will be the champions in the competitive market.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station
Download IT Central Station's free 2018 review roundup report for APM solutions
We expect 2018 to be the pivotal year where the majority of IT teams re-engineer their traditional and functionally silo'd structures towards cross-discipline teams aligned to customer journeys and business outcomes. In doing so, narrow tech-centric tooling will give way to monitoring models that facilitate fast feedback, collaboration and knowledge sharing. In this sense, application performance management will be a critical enabler; providing all teams a single source-of-truth into customer experience and presenting any performance impact in context of roles and responsibilities — all the way from the office of the CIO to site reliability engineering squads.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies
UNIFIED OBSERVABILITY
Silo monitoring of yesteryear will give way to unified observability. Breaking down the monitoring silos between user, application, system, network and security event data will help us pinpoint which optimization will have most impact on overall performance.
Peco Karayanev
Sr. Product Manager, Riverbed
APM: MISSION-CRITICAL
Application Performance Management (APM) tools help organizations to scrupulously monitor and create applications that ensure desired performance and accessibility. APM will continue to add business value for enterprises in 2018, as it will help diagnose the complex issues and lead to an improvement in application performance and customer experience. APM will also play a crucial role in ensuring that applications continue to sustain and perform even in a virtual scenario that is prone to cyber-attacks and risks.
Sairam Vedam
VP & Global Head, Marketing, Cigniti Technologies
BSM REVIVAL
Business Service Management will continue to have a revival in 2018. While the term has been around for over a decade, the ability to understand, quickly and easily, how Business and IT services are actually driving business benefits has been difficult. The evolution of APM now makes this possible and through this next year, APM vendors will be evaluated on how they are able to provide real-time information on how applications and processes are driving business outcomes.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics
OPEN SOURCE APM
Open source APM and transaction tracking will begin to mature significantly in 2018, but will still require an extremely heavy lift (code changes and lots of infrastructures) from organizations creating what will eventually become unmaintainable systems over time due to complexity.
Jonah Kowall
VP of Market Development and Insights, AppDynamics
Read Jonah Kowall's Blog: Looking Back at 2017 APM Predictions - Did They Come True?
SELF SERVICE IT
In 2018, ITSM vendors will continue improving the UX of their platforms, with an eye towards increasing workflow efficiency for both IT department staff and for IT end-users. Self-service tools (for end-users) really took off in 2017 and we expect by the end of 2018 they'll have become an expected feature and included in even the most basic ITSM suites.
Craig Borowski
Content Analyst, Software Advice (a Gartner Company)
SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEERING
In 2018 we will see the rise of site reliability engineering. One of the key tools they need is an APM solution that is developer friendly.
Matt Watson
Founder and CEO, Stackify
With the rise of continuous delivery and DevOps, a new breed of IT operations professionals is defining how services are delivered and managed. As comfortable with Python and Ruby as with configuration and capacity, they are leading the way in areas like systems automation, architectural flexibility, developer empowerment and site reliability to deliver better applications faster and with an exceptional user experience. As such, the Site Reliability Engineer role will become mainstream as many professionals refresh their software development skillsets so they can collaborate more effectively with developers.
Rick Fitz
SVP and GM of IT Markets, Splunk
DEVOPS TRANSFORMS INCIDENT MANAGEMENT
Trends in agile/DevOps will continue to transform incident management and war-room decision making, but the transformation will be a two-way street, as core advances in IT alerting, incident handling and analytics impact both sides of the equation, and best practices evolve to support a wider variety of toolsets and stakeholders.
Dennis Drogseth
VP of Research, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
Read Dennis Drogseth's Blog: At the Crossroads of Digital Transformation: The Future of the Advanced IT Analytics "Market"
APM ENABLES DEVOPS SUCCESS
2018 is the year that the industry realizes that you can't "just scratch the surface" either in adopting a DevOps culture or in adopting a cloud native architecture to get the business outcomes you desire. As a consequence, the APM market will fill the gap to steer application teams toward success in both adopting cloud native architectures and embracing DevOps best practices. This will include building in key business metrics allowing teams to quickly iterate to reach the desired business outcomes.
Mike Mallo
Offering Management Lead for APM, IBM
Read 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2, covering ITIL, ITSM and more.
The Latest
Unexpected and unintentional drops in network quality, so-called network brownouts, cause serious financial damage and frustrate employees. A recent survey sponsored by Netrounds reveals that more than 60% of network brownouts are first discovered by IT’s internal and external customers, or never even reported, instead of being proactively detected by IT organizations ...
Digital transformation reaches into every aspect of our work and personal lives, to the point that there is an automatic expectation of 24/7, anywhere availability regarding any organization with an online presence. This environment is ripe for artificial intelligence, so it's no surprise that IT Operations has been an early adopter of AI ...
A brief introduction to Applications Performance Monitoring (APM), breaking it down to a few key points, followed by a few important lessons which I have learned over the years ...
Research conducted by ServiceNow shows that Gen Zs, now entering the workforce, recognize the promise of technology to improve work experiences, are eager to learn from other generations, and believe they can help older generations be more open‑minded ...
We're in the middle of a technology and connectivity revolution, giving us access to infinite digital tools and technologies. Is this multitude of technology solutions empowering us to do our best work, or getting in our way? ...
Microservices have become the go-to architectural standard in modern distributed systems. While there are plenty of tools and techniques to architect, manage, and automate the deployment of such distributed systems, issues during troubleshooting still happen at the individual service level, thereby prolonging the time taken to resolve an outage ...
A recent APMdigest blog by Jean Tunis provided an excellent background on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and what it does. A further topic that I wanted to touch on though is the need for good quality data. If you are to get the most out of your APM solution possible, you will need to feed it with the best quality data ...
Humans and manual processes can no longer keep pace with network innovation, evolution, complexity, and change. That's why we're hearing more about self-driving networks, self-healing networks, intent-based networking, and other concepts. These approaches collectively belong to a growing focus area called AIOps, which aims to apply automation, AI and ML to support modern network operations ...
IT outages happen to companies across the globe, regardless of location, annual revenue or size. Even the most mammoth companies are at risk of downtime. Increasingly over the past few years, high-profile IT outages — defined as when the services or systems a business provides suddenly become unavailable — have ended up splashed across national news headlines ...
APM tools are ideal for an application owner or a line of business owner to track the performance of their key applications. But these tools have broader applicability to different stakeholders in an organization. In this blog, we will review the teams and functional departments that can make use of an APM tool and how they could put it to work ...
