The Holiday Season means it is time for APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, covering IT performance topics. Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, observability, AIOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023.

Despite the title, this predictions list is not only about APM. Throughout the year, APMdigest covers a variety of related technologies beyond APM, and this year's predictions list offers an equally broad scope of topics. In addition to APM, the related technologies covered include AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry, IT Service Management (ITSM), User Experience Management, Network Performance Management (NPM) and more.

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. Several predictions even directly contradict each other. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers a timely and fascinating snapshot of what the IT industry and the APM market are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for 2023.

The predictions will be posted in 8 parts over the next two weeks, with separate lists of predictions for Cloud, E-commerce and WFH to follow after the holidays. Meanwhile, DEVOPSdigest is posting a series of DevOps and development-related predictions for 2023.

A forecast by the top minds in Application Performance Management today, here are the predictions. Part 1 covers APM and Observability.

RESILIENCE IS TOP PRIORITY IN 2023

In 2023 Resilience becomes a top business priority — Resilience requires three areas: security resilience (i.e. ransomware protection), systems resilience (applications/SaaS), and network resilience (internet stack) — executive boards will require all organizations to achieve resilience to ensure continuity as these three aspects have become fundamental for most business to operate — or as security, applications and the Internet have become the lifeblood of every organization.
Howard Beader
VP, Product Marketing, Catchpoint

In the past couple of years, we've seen how essential it is for organizations to be resilient and adaptable to external changes. In 2023, business resilience will continue to remain critical. Organizations can achieve greater agility and market longevity by consolidating their observability and security data and tooling to accelerate time to resolution of incidents and strengthen the durability of their systems. Maintaining siloed IT expertise across so many tools will be a burden on fast-changing organizations.
Spiros Xanthos
SVP, General Manager, Observability, ITOps, Splunk

CLOUD OBSERVABILITY IS TOP PRIORITY in 2023

Cloud migration is not going to stop as we continue to see the results of more than three years of intense digital transformation. IT and business leaders are starting to see the true value of full-stack observability, and in 2023, this will translate to the cloud. Cloud-native observability will become a massive priority for businesses who want to better manage and protect their long-term investments in this vital technology. However, a critical component will be to ensure these leaders also measure business outcomes to ensure the impact is fully optimized.
Gregg Ostrowski
Executive CTO, Cisco AppDynamics

Read the blog by Gregg Ostrowski: Here's What It Takes to Be an Elite IT Leader in 2022

Providing comprehensive cloud application visibility and performance management will be essential for customers this upcoming year as they look for providers with offers that enhance scalability and security. We'll also see cloud providers increase their investments in 5G edge computing to support the increased interest around APM as it will provide higher peak data speeds, providing valuable real-time insight into their application's performance and their end users' digital experiences.
Ashvin Kamaraju
CTO and VP Engineering, Thales Cloud Protection & Licensing

OBSERVABILITY IS ABSOLUTE NECESSITY IN 2023

Application teams, including DevOps and SRE teams, will leverage observability to look both at application uptime and performance (with APM observability), and internet network (with IPM observability) as most organizations will realize monitoring the internet stack (CDNs, routing, DNS, SD-WAN, SASE, ISPs, etc.) is an absolute necessity to ensure uptime and performance.”
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

Read the blog by Mehdi Daoudi: For a 360-Degree View of the Customer, Combine Active and Passive Observability

Observability is becoming a standard practice across the industry and a key investment area, which will continue into 2023.
Alois Reitbauer
Chief Technology Strategist, Dynatrace

APM MERGES WITH OBSERVABILITY

The lines between traditional APM and Observability will continue to blur, spurred on by new open source tools that offer APM-like functionality as an integrated part of an Observability stack. In addition, new application models for cloud-native software will begin to create a need for more standards and guidance on vital measurements for cloud-native application performance.
Austin Parker
Head of DevRel, LightStep

APM ISN'T DEAD — JUST DIFFERENT

Application performance monitoring (APM) is dead or dying in its current state and as a stand-alone market, but it's still useful and necessary as a practice. While observability is the goal, APM is still a necessary part of the big picture. APM grew from an on-premise environment, so with mobile applications running everywhere, observability can be considered the new APM.
Erez Barak
VP of Product Development for Observability, Sumo Logic

SERVICEOPS BECOMES PREVAILING OPERATIONAL MODEL

ServiceOps — the convergence of IT service and operations — will become the prevailing IT operational model because it makes business sense and is both possible and practical. In this model, IT service and IT operations retain their distinctive charters and skillsets but increasingly unify on the basis of shared data, AI, automation, and common business goals. Not a bright shining new concept, ServiceOps is a pragmatic hybrid of technology enablement and organizational advances designed to drive IT operational and service excellence.
Valerie O'Connell
Research Director, Digital Service Execution, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

Read the blog by Valerie O'Connell: ServiceOps - ITSM and ITOps Move from Cooperation to Collaboration

In 2023, there will be an increased movement to drive consolidation between IT Services and IT Operations solutions and processes (aka Service Operation). This will happen partially as a cost mitigation step, but also as a means to providing better, more productive experiences.
Bruce Randall
Head of ITSM/AIOps Product Marketing, ServiceNow

LOG ANALYSIS BECOMES LESS IMPORTANT

Log analysis, while still essential, will become relatively less important to ops personnel as the real-time behavior of applications grows more critical to business needs. Other forms of telemetry that provide better insights into real-time behavior than logs will come to dominate the APM and IT performance landscape.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

MOVING FROM LOGS TO TRACING

We're moving away from logs as the "one source of truth" for application activity, and the assumption that logs and metrics provide all the information needed to understand and debug apps, especially highly distributed applications based on serverless and containers. The kinds of questions we need to ask — where exactly did my application fail? What service is taking too long to respond? — can really only be answered with distributed tracing, which looks at how requests pass through the different services that make up your application, and brings those events into order. It's this information that will really enhance their debugging capabilities and give developers what they need to troubleshoot quickly and even optimize their applications. The real change will come from this being no-code and fully automated instrumentation, allowing developers an end-to-end view of their distributed env, without having to understand the mechanics of tracing.
Aviad Mor
Co-Founder and CTO, Lumigo

OBSERVABILITY BACKED BY AIOPS

Observability implementations will skyrocket — albeit they will be more specialized and domain-focused, resulting in the creation of silos. The majority of such Observability implementations will be accompanied by purpose-built and domain-agnostic AIOps platforms that can bridge silos, drive enterprise-wide business outcomes and help maximize the return from Observability investments.
Tejo Prayaga
Sr. Director, Product Management, CloudFabrix

OBSERVABILITY INTEGRATES LEGACY TELEMETRY DATA AND BUSINESS DATA

For Observability to become truly valuable, it needs to expand beyond the scope of cloud-native workloads and microservices. Observability practices will begin to look beyond the horizon, towards integrating legacy workload telemetry data as well as integrating with business data and analytics, to provide a truly holistic view of systems and what makes them work.
Austin Parker
Head of DevRel, LightStep

OBSERVABILITY ADDS NETWORK-DERIVED INTELLIGENCE

For the past decade Observability tools have been incredibly useful for app monitoring, and like many technologies before, they're now starting to max out in scope and value. The 5 most used features in Microsoft Word were Paste, Save, Copy, Undo and Bold — then came collaborative editing. The leap for observability in '23 will be the addition of network-derived intelligence to metrics, events, logs and traces.
Bassam Khan
VP of Product and Technical Marketing Engineering, Gigamon

OBSERVABILITY CONSOLIDATES WITH SECURITY AND BUSINESS ANALYTICS

The data explosion from hybrid and multicloud environments, combined with the complexity of technology stacks, will push teams in 2023 to look for new ways to drive intelligent automation. Traditional cloud monitoring and analytics tools are siloed and require manual input from teams, which steals time from innovation and makes it challenging to retain context of data. Combining observability, security, and business analytics will become necessary to consolidate tools, provide IT teams with all insights in context, and as a result, tame rising cloud complexity.
Alois Reitbauer
Chief Technology Strategist, Dynatrace

OBSERVABILITY BECOMES BUSINESS FOCUSED

To achieve true cloud-native observability amid increasingly complex environments, more IT leaders will implement and encourage key mindset changes within organizations to reach business goals. Cloud-native technologists (e.g. SREs, DevOps or CloudOps teams) will evolve to have a very business-focused mentality, tying their activities back to the impact they're having on their organizations.
Gregg Ostrowski
Executive CTO, Cisco AppDynamics

Go to: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2, covering more on observability.