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

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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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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

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 ...