2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

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 4 covers the end user experience.

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

END USER EXPERIENCE

User experience (UX) monitoring becomes more prevalent, as organizations seek to better understand and highlight the last mile.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

The end user experience will be ever more important and more volatile because of the increased app complexity.
Peco Karayanev
Sr. Product Manager, Riverbed

In today's competitive market, customer experience is what differentiates one business from another. In 2018 understanding this experience will require a combination of monitoring and analytics across the digital ecosystem for insights into the customer journey, where users are dropping off and how performance affects the end-user. As business accelerate innovation to meet customer demands, monitoring tools will need to adapt to all forms of new technologies such as containers, cloud and IoT devices to fully attain the impact on customer loyalty and revenue.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

Looking into 2018, businesses will need to address the overall quality of their services as the competitive landscape evens out. This will result in a refocus on the monitoring of the customer experience and the need for extensive end-to-end testing, embedded within the delivery lifecycle.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CSO, Apica

Read Sven Hammar's Blog: What's Ahead for the Software Testing Industry in 2018?

Digital leaders will treat digital transformation as a partnership between business and IT, with a shared focus on meaningful outcomes and better experiences for customers and employees. Digital leaders will put people — customers, citizens, employees and partners — at the center of their transformation efforts. They will prioritize design thinking, a user-centric approach that shifts the focus from adding features to adding value. They will take advantage of platform tooling to involve users in solution design and invest in dedicated UX teams to deliver better experiences faster.
Chris Wiborg
VP of Product Marketing, Alfresco Software

I believe we will see more and more businesses investing in user experience management tools, as user analytics have proven to help improve productivity in so many ways. Some companies will use UEM to supplement APM, extending their KPIs and SLAs to encapsulate the human factor. Others will use UEM to assist with UX design, because they can easily identify features that are generating user confusion or are prone to failure. Still others will find that UEM tools can help ensure a smooth migration to new technology platforms - including SAP S/4HANA, cloud, or mobile.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MONITORING

2018 will be the year in which End-User Experience Management begins to evolve at pace into Digital Experience Monitoring. No longer will the end user only be a human, but with the development of IoT, could be a machine or device. In this respect it's important that APM vendors ensure that they are not only able to monitor every user but every device and every sensor.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

RUM with JAVASCRIPT

RUM (Real-User Monitoring) with JavaScript is a very important technology, and will be essential in 2018 to track availability, functionality and responsiveness on the client-side. To complement this, native SDK for monitoring will improve exponentially in 2018, giving granular visibility to an increasingly complex IT environment.
Boris Krasniansky
Solution Architect, Correlsense

CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION

The role of IT Ops is continuing to be more closely tied to end user experience, which will change the nature of ITOps' relationships with other lines of business –– particularly customer service. As consumer expectations for a seamless digital experience become increasingly higher, the pressure is now on ITOps to address service disruptions quickly while keeping customer support in lock-step as they resolve problems. As we've seen with recent headline-making data breaches, this is particularly true in the case of security incidents. Real-time customer communication about IT and security issues is becoming table stakes, and ITOps will need to reconsider their business-wide communications strategy in order to meet these expectations.
Eric Sigler
Head of DevOps, PagerDuty

APM MOVES TOWARD MARKETING

In 2018 APM will start to link the user experience with technical metrics. Rather than focusing simply on the backend infrastructure, APM will need to understand the client side and link the user behavior with the technical behavior of the system. As a result, APM will move out of IT ops and will move towards marketing in 2018.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Testplant

NETOPS RESPONSIBLE FOR USER EXPERIENCE

Designers, marketers and developers have traditionally been the custodians of user experience — creating elaborate customer journeys, compelling audio and visual communication and intuitive transitions design to reduce complexity for the end user. But as applications and online services move to the cloud, network teams are increasingly being tasked with delivering on service level agreements and ensuring high quality user experience. We're now moving into the cloud-first world, and it's no longer acceptable to simply blame service degradation on a third party. Organizations that rely on public networks, DNS, CDN and DDoS mitigation providers for the delivery of apps and services have to take ownership of the user experience across unowned networks and services. Network teams will go beyond outage and status pages to offer internal and external client groups more detailed, self-service views into the performance of applications that they uniquely care about and the impact of network factors. In 2018 network engineers will start being measured against user experience-focused KPIs.
Alex Henthorn-Iwane
VP of Product Marketing, ThousandEyes

EMPLOYEE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

I think we will see HR departments collaborating with IT to ensure that user analytics are mined to improve employee satisfaction and retention.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

Employee digital experience becomes top priority. The balance between the external customer-facing digital world and internal employee-facing one has been slowing shifting in the past year as organizations realize they cannot be effective externally if they are not equally effective internally. This shift will accelerate in 2018. Evidence for this can be found in the many large organizations investing strongly in strategic digital workplace programs and in the creation and hiring of new roles such as director of digital workplace or chief employee experience officer.
Pedro Bados
CEO and Co-Founder, Nexthink

Read 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5, covering NoOps, Analytics, Machine Learning and AI.

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2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

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 4 covers the end user experience.

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

END USER EXPERIENCE

User experience (UX) monitoring becomes more prevalent, as organizations seek to better understand and highlight the last mile.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

The end user experience will be ever more important and more volatile because of the increased app complexity.
Peco Karayanev
Sr. Product Manager, Riverbed

In today's competitive market, customer experience is what differentiates one business from another. In 2018 understanding this experience will require a combination of monitoring and analytics across the digital ecosystem for insights into the customer journey, where users are dropping off and how performance affects the end-user. As business accelerate innovation to meet customer demands, monitoring tools will need to adapt to all forms of new technologies such as containers, cloud and IoT devices to fully attain the impact on customer loyalty and revenue.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

Looking into 2018, businesses will need to address the overall quality of their services as the competitive landscape evens out. This will result in a refocus on the monitoring of the customer experience and the need for extensive end-to-end testing, embedded within the delivery lifecycle.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CSO, Apica

Read Sven Hammar's Blog: What's Ahead for the Software Testing Industry in 2018?

Digital leaders will treat digital transformation as a partnership between business and IT, with a shared focus on meaningful outcomes and better experiences for customers and employees. Digital leaders will put people — customers, citizens, employees and partners — at the center of their transformation efforts. They will prioritize design thinking, a user-centric approach that shifts the focus from adding features to adding value. They will take advantage of platform tooling to involve users in solution design and invest in dedicated UX teams to deliver better experiences faster.
Chris Wiborg
VP of Product Marketing, Alfresco Software

I believe we will see more and more businesses investing in user experience management tools, as user analytics have proven to help improve productivity in so many ways. Some companies will use UEM to supplement APM, extending their KPIs and SLAs to encapsulate the human factor. Others will use UEM to assist with UX design, because they can easily identify features that are generating user confusion or are prone to failure. Still others will find that UEM tools can help ensure a smooth migration to new technology platforms - including SAP S/4HANA, cloud, or mobile.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MONITORING

2018 will be the year in which End-User Experience Management begins to evolve at pace into Digital Experience Monitoring. No longer will the end user only be a human, but with the development of IoT, could be a machine or device. In this respect it's important that APM vendors ensure that they are not only able to monitor every user but every device and every sensor.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

RUM with JAVASCRIPT

RUM (Real-User Monitoring) with JavaScript is a very important technology, and will be essential in 2018 to track availability, functionality and responsiveness on the client-side. To complement this, native SDK for monitoring will improve exponentially in 2018, giving granular visibility to an increasingly complex IT environment.
Boris Krasniansky
Solution Architect, Correlsense

CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION

The role of IT Ops is continuing to be more closely tied to end user experience, which will change the nature of ITOps' relationships with other lines of business –– particularly customer service. As consumer expectations for a seamless digital experience become increasingly higher, the pressure is now on ITOps to address service disruptions quickly while keeping customer support in lock-step as they resolve problems. As we've seen with recent headline-making data breaches, this is particularly true in the case of security incidents. Real-time customer communication about IT and security issues is becoming table stakes, and ITOps will need to reconsider their business-wide communications strategy in order to meet these expectations.
Eric Sigler
Head of DevOps, PagerDuty

APM MOVES TOWARD MARKETING

In 2018 APM will start to link the user experience with technical metrics. Rather than focusing simply on the backend infrastructure, APM will need to understand the client side and link the user behavior with the technical behavior of the system. As a result, APM will move out of IT ops and will move towards marketing in 2018.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Testplant

NETOPS RESPONSIBLE FOR USER EXPERIENCE

Designers, marketers and developers have traditionally been the custodians of user experience — creating elaborate customer journeys, compelling audio and visual communication and intuitive transitions design to reduce complexity for the end user. But as applications and online services move to the cloud, network teams are increasingly being tasked with delivering on service level agreements and ensuring high quality user experience. We're now moving into the cloud-first world, and it's no longer acceptable to simply blame service degradation on a third party. Organizations that rely on public networks, DNS, CDN and DDoS mitigation providers for the delivery of apps and services have to take ownership of the user experience across unowned networks and services. Network teams will go beyond outage and status pages to offer internal and external client groups more detailed, self-service views into the performance of applications that they uniquely care about and the impact of network factors. In 2018 network engineers will start being measured against user experience-focused KPIs.
Alex Henthorn-Iwane
VP of Product Marketing, ThousandEyes

EMPLOYEE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

I think we will see HR departments collaborating with IT to ensure that user analytics are mined to improve employee satisfaction and retention.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

Employee digital experience becomes top priority. The balance between the external customer-facing digital world and internal employee-facing one has been slowing shifting in the past year as organizations realize they cannot be effective externally if they are not equally effective internally. This shift will accelerate in 2018. Evidence for this can be found in the many large organizations investing strongly in strategic digital workplace programs and in the creation and hiring of new roles such as director of digital workplace or chief employee experience officer.
Pedro Bados
CEO and Co-Founder, Nexthink

Read 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5, covering NoOps, Analytics, Machine Learning and AI.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Implementing AI Isn't the Hard Part Anymore - Adoption Is

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 ...

 

The Incident Load Is Rising, but Recovery Times Aren't Moving

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 ...

Your AI Pipeline May Have a Document Observability Problem

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 ...

The SIEM Isn't the Problem. Your Telemetry Architecture Is

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 ...

As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

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 ...

Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

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? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

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 ...

The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 27: Observability Unification

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ...