2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

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. Part 3 covers APM and monitoring.

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

APP COMPLEXITY CHALLENGES TRADITIONAL MONITORING

The demand to put software into production fueled by Digitalization (or Digitization, or Digital Transformation), combined with the complexity, scale and rate of change in virtualized environments, cloud based environments, containers and micro-services will break monitoring as we know it.
Bernd Harzog
Founder, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, OpsDataStore

Experimentation is the mandatory 2018 New Year's resolution for any business wishing to prosper in the digital economy. As such, new development styles and container platforms supporting more rapid delivery will become the de facto application architectures. But there's a tradeoff. Dynamic distributed systems introduce unprecedented complexity that challenge traditional monitoring tools, processes and team structures. In response, successful teams will adopt modern approaches where monitoring is seen as less break-fix and more as a critical performance foundation; allowing businesses to confidently adopt and experiment with new solutions — be that containers, serverless computing, IoT … whatever comes next!
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

COVERGENCE OF APM AND INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING

As application architectures have become more distributed and heterogeneous, they are increasingly reliant on supporting infrastructure tiers: network, virtualization, storage, database, cloud, and so on. In 2018, we will see APM vendors expanding their monitoring capabilities to provide visibility of supporting IT infrastructure components. Application managers and IT teams will realize that they need contextual visibility into how an infrastructure problem affects application performance, and seek APM solutions that cross-correlate code-level and transaction-level performance with the health of the supporting physical, virtual, container and cloud infrastructures.
Vinod Mohan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, eG Innovations

eG Innovations 2018 Predictions: Greater Things Expected From APM

APP-CENTRIC IPM

Whereas infrastructure performance management (IPM) has traditionally collected data from virtual machines, servers and storage arrays, the new era of IPM will focus on the application. Since applications reside across various layers of network and storage environments, this "app-centric" version of IPM provides a different level of visibility into the performance, scalability and optimization of the infrastructure itself and the workloads that rely on it. This will also shift the focus from traditional metrics, such as infrastructure response times, to workload behavior analysis and intelligent placement.
John Gentry
CTO, Virtual Instruments

SHIFT-LEFT MONITORING

2018 will see the continued reinvention of IT Operations and refinement of DevOps practices. Rather than being an end-of-cycle and cost-centric function, leading teams will extend the notion of "shift-left" monitoring by actually developing, marketing and supporting easy to access, opt-in cloud monitoring services their colleagues and partners can use to profile the performance impacts of architecture, design and coding decisions before deployment. What will differentiate the leaders from the laggards in 2018, will be their use of modern monitoring techniques to improve in-house competitiveness and be ready to answer any questions on viability and relevance.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

CLOUD APM

According to reviews on IT Central Station, the popularity of cloud APM solutions increased throughout 2017. We expect to see this trend continue through 2018 as more companies migrate to the cloud.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Download IT Central Station's free 2018 review roundup report for APM solutions

Visibility into what's happening in the public cloud will become a mainstream requirement of IT in 2018. As infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors have been ramping up capabilities, getting actionable visibility into what's really happening beyond the enterprise's network will be in much higher demand.
Larry Zulch
President, Savvius

You can expect end-to-end performance monitoring to grow in strategic importance as companies move applications and services to hybrid cloud or multi-cloud. Maximizing business results requires understanding dependencies before, during and after migrating applications to the cloud. As complexity grows, so will the need to gain a top-down detailed picture of the IT environment to truly understand what is really happening with applications and services, both in real-time and historically. The IT organization will need pervasive visibility spanning on-premises and off-premises along with insights gained from smart data to deliver a satisfying user experience.
Ron Lifton
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout

APPLICATION DEPENDENCY MAPPING

Application dependency mapping will continue improvement, adding visibility into how external/federated application resources are being consumed, highlighting the impact on the application. Improved visualizations and "data blending" techniques will provide better context to application monitoring.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

MOBILE APM

Mobile is set to exceed 5 billion users by 2019. So as this channel becomes more and more important, monitoring the activity of users from their mobile devices, both via mobile web sites and native applications, will be increasingly crucial for the APM software market.
Boris Krasniansky
Solution Architect, Correlsense

CROWD-SOURCING

Adoption of crowd sourcing techniques will yield improved insights into common application problems, resulting in a better end product for users.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

REAL-TIME APM FOR IOT

The IoT has resulted in an exponential increase in the number of clients and in 2018 real-time monitoring will be a big issue for APM. Real-time monitoring is now essential and will be a huge challenge for APM and not just in 2018!
Antony Edwards
CTO, Testplant

There will be continued interest in how APM solutions can help proactively monitor IoT-based services and applications. But what's important is that there is clear value differentiation on what APM can bring to the table in terms of IoT monitoring. In this respect, it's not just being able to understand device errors but understanding transactions created by IoT devices/sensors, then correlating and transforming this data into business information e.g. not just that a device is having an issue but who is the customer/user and how important are they to the company.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

APM FOR BLOCKCHAIN

With the explosion of Bitcoin and the massive grown of cryptocurrency smart contracts, 2018 may well be entering the global adoption phase of blockchain technology, just as 1993 was for email. As businesses everywhere begin to stake a claim, this gold rush will lead to blockchain related performance bottlenecks, and APM solutions will need to begin monitoring blockchain synchronization and peer-to-peer performance, along with smart contract execution and transaction rates. Because these decentralized blockchain smart contracts will integrate directly into the web and mobile order processing, APM leaders will be in a race to offer such instrumentation, visibility, and performance analysis, as part of their complete "end to end" performance monitoring solutions.
Matt Hintze
CEO, HITS Inc

Read 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4, covering the end-user experience.

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

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The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

Observability Costs Rising Faster Than Value

The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

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IT's Motivation Crisis Is Really a Process Crisis

If your best engineers spend their days sorting tickets and resetting access, you are wasting talent. New global data shows that employees in the IT sector rank among the least motivated across industries. They're under a lot of pressure from many angles. Pressure to upskill and uncertainty around what agentic AI means for job security is creating anxiety. Meanwhile, these roles often function like an on-call job and require many repetitive tasks ...

2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

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. Part 3 covers APM and monitoring.

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

APP COMPLEXITY CHALLENGES TRADITIONAL MONITORING

The demand to put software into production fueled by Digitalization (or Digitization, or Digital Transformation), combined with the complexity, scale and rate of change in virtualized environments, cloud based environments, containers and micro-services will break monitoring as we know it.
Bernd Harzog
Founder, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, OpsDataStore

Experimentation is the mandatory 2018 New Year's resolution for any business wishing to prosper in the digital economy. As such, new development styles and container platforms supporting more rapid delivery will become the de facto application architectures. But there's a tradeoff. Dynamic distributed systems introduce unprecedented complexity that challenge traditional monitoring tools, processes and team structures. In response, successful teams will adopt modern approaches where monitoring is seen as less break-fix and more as a critical performance foundation; allowing businesses to confidently adopt and experiment with new solutions — be that containers, serverless computing, IoT … whatever comes next!
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

COVERGENCE OF APM AND INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING

As application architectures have become more distributed and heterogeneous, they are increasingly reliant on supporting infrastructure tiers: network, virtualization, storage, database, cloud, and so on. In 2018, we will see APM vendors expanding their monitoring capabilities to provide visibility of supporting IT infrastructure components. Application managers and IT teams will realize that they need contextual visibility into how an infrastructure problem affects application performance, and seek APM solutions that cross-correlate code-level and transaction-level performance with the health of the supporting physical, virtual, container and cloud infrastructures.
Vinod Mohan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, eG Innovations

eG Innovations 2018 Predictions: Greater Things Expected From APM

APP-CENTRIC IPM

Whereas infrastructure performance management (IPM) has traditionally collected data from virtual machines, servers and storage arrays, the new era of IPM will focus on the application. Since applications reside across various layers of network and storage environments, this "app-centric" version of IPM provides a different level of visibility into the performance, scalability and optimization of the infrastructure itself and the workloads that rely on it. This will also shift the focus from traditional metrics, such as infrastructure response times, to workload behavior analysis and intelligent placement.
John Gentry
CTO, Virtual Instruments

SHIFT-LEFT MONITORING

2018 will see the continued reinvention of IT Operations and refinement of DevOps practices. Rather than being an end-of-cycle and cost-centric function, leading teams will extend the notion of "shift-left" monitoring by actually developing, marketing and supporting easy to access, opt-in cloud monitoring services their colleagues and partners can use to profile the performance impacts of architecture, design and coding decisions before deployment. What will differentiate the leaders from the laggards in 2018, will be their use of modern monitoring techniques to improve in-house competitiveness and be ready to answer any questions on viability and relevance.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

CLOUD APM

According to reviews on IT Central Station, the popularity of cloud APM solutions increased throughout 2017. We expect to see this trend continue through 2018 as more companies migrate to the cloud.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Download IT Central Station's free 2018 review roundup report for APM solutions

Visibility into what's happening in the public cloud will become a mainstream requirement of IT in 2018. As infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors have been ramping up capabilities, getting actionable visibility into what's really happening beyond the enterprise's network will be in much higher demand.
Larry Zulch
President, Savvius

You can expect end-to-end performance monitoring to grow in strategic importance as companies move applications and services to hybrid cloud or multi-cloud. Maximizing business results requires understanding dependencies before, during and after migrating applications to the cloud. As complexity grows, so will the need to gain a top-down detailed picture of the IT environment to truly understand what is really happening with applications and services, both in real-time and historically. The IT organization will need pervasive visibility spanning on-premises and off-premises along with insights gained from smart data to deliver a satisfying user experience.
Ron Lifton
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout

APPLICATION DEPENDENCY MAPPING

Application dependency mapping will continue improvement, adding visibility into how external/federated application resources are being consumed, highlighting the impact on the application. Improved visualizations and "data blending" techniques will provide better context to application monitoring.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

MOBILE APM

Mobile is set to exceed 5 billion users by 2019. So as this channel becomes more and more important, monitoring the activity of users from their mobile devices, both via mobile web sites and native applications, will be increasingly crucial for the APM software market.
Boris Krasniansky
Solution Architect, Correlsense

CROWD-SOURCING

Adoption of crowd sourcing techniques will yield improved insights into common application problems, resulting in a better end product for users.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

REAL-TIME APM FOR IOT

The IoT has resulted in an exponential increase in the number of clients and in 2018 real-time monitoring will be a big issue for APM. Real-time monitoring is now essential and will be a huge challenge for APM and not just in 2018!
Antony Edwards
CTO, Testplant

There will be continued interest in how APM solutions can help proactively monitor IoT-based services and applications. But what's important is that there is clear value differentiation on what APM can bring to the table in terms of IoT monitoring. In this respect, it's not just being able to understand device errors but understanding transactions created by IoT devices/sensors, then correlating and transforming this data into business information e.g. not just that a device is having an issue but who is the customer/user and how important are they to the company.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

APM FOR BLOCKCHAIN

With the explosion of Bitcoin and the massive grown of cryptocurrency smart contracts, 2018 may well be entering the global adoption phase of blockchain technology, just as 1993 was for email. As businesses everywhere begin to stake a claim, this gold rush will lead to blockchain related performance bottlenecks, and APM solutions will need to begin monitoring blockchain synchronization and peer-to-peer performance, along with smart contract execution and transaction rates. Because these decentralized blockchain smart contracts will integrate directly into the web and mobile order processing, APM leaders will be in a race to offer such instrumentation, visibility, and performance analysis, as part of their complete "end to end" performance monitoring solutions.
Matt Hintze
CEO, HITS Inc

Read 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4, covering the end-user experience.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

Observability Costs Rising Faster Than Value

The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

Customers Demand Frictionless Experiences - This Is How Retailers Can Provide Them

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly ...

IT's Motivation Crisis Is Really a Process Crisis

If your best engineers spend their days sorting tickets and resetting access, you are wasting talent. New global data shows that employees in the IT sector rank among the least motivated across industries. They're under a lot of pressure from many angles. Pressure to upskill and uncertainty around what agentic AI means for job security is creating anxiety. Meanwhile, these roles often function like an on-call job and require many repetitive tasks ...