2022 Network Performance Management Predictions

As part of APMdigest's list of 2022 predictions, industry experts offer thoughtful and insightful predictions on how Network Performance Management (NPM) and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022.

NETWORK OBSERVABILITY

Network performance management (NPM) vendors will start evolving toward network observability to serve an IT industry that is embracing multi-cloud, edge cloud, work-from-anywhere, and internet-based WANs. Deep visibility into traditional on-premises networks simply isn't enough for modern IT Operations teams. Via organic development and mergers and acquisitions, NPM vendors will add AIOps, security monitoring, cloud monitoring, and digital experience monitoring to their core NPM capabilities to provide total visibility into digital operations. NetOps teams are trying to align with SecOps and DevOps, and network observability solutions from their traditional NPM vendors would certainly help them accomplish this.
Shamus McGillicuddy
VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

Network observability will continue to be important. We spent a lot of time with the magnifying glass on the "work from anywhere user," and that will swing a little bit back into the physical locations because of office openings.
Phillip Gervasi
Senior Technical Evangelist, Riverbed

IMPROVING USER INTERFACES FOR NPM

IT Central Station users are looking forward to seeing an improvement in the user interfaces of network management applications. It is currently difficult to transfer an interface from one virtual domain to another and our users would like to see this transition simplified.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station, (soon to be PeerSpot)

CONVERGENCE OF NPM, APM AND SECURITY

Accelerated digital transformation has propelled the move to cloud and SaaS applications. Cloud provider selection is now being driven more by business outcomes instead of IT requirements, forcing a diverse multi-cloud environment. This is creating big visibility challenges for NetOps teams as they're tasked to deliver optimized performance securely. In 2022, IT operations will finally adopt a single source of visibility for application performance management and network security that will allow NetOps and SecOps teams to be truly aligned. This will likely come in the form of network performance monitoring solutions that are adding security functionality, like the ability to see into encrypted traffic (or NDR solutions).
Thomas Pore
Director of Security Products, LiveAction

CONVERGENCE OF NPM WITH BROADER OBSERVABILITY

As IT environments become more hybrid, more distributed, more complex, IT teams will evolve their network monitoring practices to support broader observability objectives. This requires breaking down traditional IT silos, capturing full-fidelity telemetry from the entire digital ecosystem, and transforming massive amounts of data into actionable insights that can be used across IT domains to accelerate decision-making and problem resolution.
Phillip Gervasi
Senior Technical Evangelist, Riverbed

AI ASSISTANTS AND AIOPS JOIN NPM

AI assistants that can manage and troubleshoot networks on par with human domain experts, will be promoted to a member of the IT team in 2022. In the enterprise, AI, machine learning and AIOps ultimately have the potential to become as trusted a source as the most experienced IT domain expert. While we're not there yet, in the coming year we can expect AI assistants and conversational interfaces to take on a more serious and trusted role in the enterprise. At present, AI conversational interfaces can answer up to 70% of support tickets with the same effectiveness as a domain expert. As network complexity and distributed workloads increase, AIOps and virtual AI assistants will become viewed as an essential member of IT teams. Further, as cloud services continue to scale to provide unlimited, cost-effective processing and storage, both enterprises and technology providers will be empowered to adopt AI assistants across various support teams — feeding in the volume and quality of data necessary to train AI technologies to increase their accuracy.
Bob Friday
VP and CTO, Juniper Networks AI-Driven Enterprise

AI/ML ENHANCE NETWORK PERFORMANCE

The industry will see significant growth in investment in AI/ML and automation. Based on testing, we see significant growth in AI/ML and automation to enhance network performance and fault management. In particular, more operators are investing in active testing and assurance systems to inject synthetic traffic into their networks to emulate real users and services, instead of relying on static, passive probes. And they're seeking to pair these systems with AI/ML algorithms that can make good decisions in real time for where, when, and what to actively test to improve services or isolate faults, without requiring human intervention. We also expect to see early efforts in using AI/ML to enhance security, and in running testing workloads from public cloud.
Steve Douglas
Head of Market Strategy, Spirent Communications

LOAD BALANCERS WILL DISAPPEAR

Centralized load balancers will disappear within 3-4 years. Unlike many of our processes and technologies for managing modern applications, load balancers have remained largely unchanged and are ripe for disruption. Centralized load balancers simply do not make sense in a decentralized world. They add an extra hop in the network, increase latency and are not portable.
Marco Palladino,
CTO and Co-Founder, Kong

RIP AND REPLACE NETWORKING

There's going to be a lot of refresh activity in the enterprise as offices with in person employees ramp back up. I expect IT spending will change. Prior to the pandemic spending was focused on endpoint and security and cloud, and now I see spending shifting towards hardware refresh in the coming year. Security will still be an active topic, but it's going to push more to the cloud because more and more workloads are moving to the cloud.
Phillip Gervasi
Senior Technical Evangelist, Riverbed

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2022 Network Performance Management Predictions

As part of APMdigest's list of 2022 predictions, industry experts offer thoughtful and insightful predictions on how Network Performance Management (NPM) and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022.

NETWORK OBSERVABILITY

Network performance management (NPM) vendors will start evolving toward network observability to serve an IT industry that is embracing multi-cloud, edge cloud, work-from-anywhere, and internet-based WANs. Deep visibility into traditional on-premises networks simply isn't enough for modern IT Operations teams. Via organic development and mergers and acquisitions, NPM vendors will add AIOps, security monitoring, cloud monitoring, and digital experience monitoring to their core NPM capabilities to provide total visibility into digital operations. NetOps teams are trying to align with SecOps and DevOps, and network observability solutions from their traditional NPM vendors would certainly help them accomplish this.
Shamus McGillicuddy
VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

Network observability will continue to be important. We spent a lot of time with the magnifying glass on the "work from anywhere user," and that will swing a little bit back into the physical locations because of office openings.
Phillip Gervasi
Senior Technical Evangelist, Riverbed

IMPROVING USER INTERFACES FOR NPM

IT Central Station users are looking forward to seeing an improvement in the user interfaces of network management applications. It is currently difficult to transfer an interface from one virtual domain to another and our users would like to see this transition simplified.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station, (soon to be PeerSpot)

CONVERGENCE OF NPM, APM AND SECURITY

Accelerated digital transformation has propelled the move to cloud and SaaS applications. Cloud provider selection is now being driven more by business outcomes instead of IT requirements, forcing a diverse multi-cloud environment. This is creating big visibility challenges for NetOps teams as they're tasked to deliver optimized performance securely. In 2022, IT operations will finally adopt a single source of visibility for application performance management and network security that will allow NetOps and SecOps teams to be truly aligned. This will likely come in the form of network performance monitoring solutions that are adding security functionality, like the ability to see into encrypted traffic (or NDR solutions).
Thomas Pore
Director of Security Products, LiveAction

CONVERGENCE OF NPM WITH BROADER OBSERVABILITY

As IT environments become more hybrid, more distributed, more complex, IT teams will evolve their network monitoring practices to support broader observability objectives. This requires breaking down traditional IT silos, capturing full-fidelity telemetry from the entire digital ecosystem, and transforming massive amounts of data into actionable insights that can be used across IT domains to accelerate decision-making and problem resolution.
Phillip Gervasi
Senior Technical Evangelist, Riverbed

AI ASSISTANTS AND AIOPS JOIN NPM

AI assistants that can manage and troubleshoot networks on par with human domain experts, will be promoted to a member of the IT team in 2022. In the enterprise, AI, machine learning and AIOps ultimately have the potential to become as trusted a source as the most experienced IT domain expert. While we're not there yet, in the coming year we can expect AI assistants and conversational interfaces to take on a more serious and trusted role in the enterprise. At present, AI conversational interfaces can answer up to 70% of support tickets with the same effectiveness as a domain expert. As network complexity and distributed workloads increase, AIOps and virtual AI assistants will become viewed as an essential member of IT teams. Further, as cloud services continue to scale to provide unlimited, cost-effective processing and storage, both enterprises and technology providers will be empowered to adopt AI assistants across various support teams — feeding in the volume and quality of data necessary to train AI technologies to increase their accuracy.
Bob Friday
VP and CTO, Juniper Networks AI-Driven Enterprise

AI/ML ENHANCE NETWORK PERFORMANCE

The industry will see significant growth in investment in AI/ML and automation. Based on testing, we see significant growth in AI/ML and automation to enhance network performance and fault management. In particular, more operators are investing in active testing and assurance systems to inject synthetic traffic into their networks to emulate real users and services, instead of relying on static, passive probes. And they're seeking to pair these systems with AI/ML algorithms that can make good decisions in real time for where, when, and what to actively test to improve services or isolate faults, without requiring human intervention. We also expect to see early efforts in using AI/ML to enhance security, and in running testing workloads from public cloud.
Steve Douglas
Head of Market Strategy, Spirent Communications

LOAD BALANCERS WILL DISAPPEAR

Centralized load balancers will disappear within 3-4 years. Unlike many of our processes and technologies for managing modern applications, load balancers have remained largely unchanged and are ripe for disruption. Centralized load balancers simply do not make sense in a decentralized world. They add an extra hop in the network, increase latency and are not portable.
Marco Palladino,
CTO and Co-Founder, Kong

RIP AND REPLACE NETWORKING

There's going to be a lot of refresh activity in the enterprise as offices with in person employees ramp back up. I expect IT spending will change. Prior to the pandemic spending was focused on endpoint and security and cloud, and now I see spending shifting towards hardware refresh in the coming year. Security will still be an active topic, but it's going to push more to the cloud because more and more workloads are moving to the cloud.
Phillip Gervasi
Senior Technical Evangelist, Riverbed

Related Links

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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

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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 ...