2025 Observability Predictions - Part 5

In APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer predictions on how Observability and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2025. Part 5 covers user experience, Digital Experience Management (DEM) and the hybrid workforce.

Re-engineering user experience in the age of AI

Customers have always been a priority, but there is another group of stakeholders that are equally as important to an enterprise's success — its employees. However, the exponential rise of emerging tech like GenAI and the pressure to adopt this tech has thrown the user experience into disarray. Now is the time for companies to invest in re-imagining and redesigning their existing technology architecture. While the upfront cost might seem steep, their business's long-term success depends on it.
Rajesh Ganesan
President, ManageEngine

ManageEngine


MILLISECONDS - THE NEW STANDARD FOR DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

Milliseconds Define the New Standard for Uptime and User Experience: Milliseconds will become a critical metric for digital performance, as even slight delays accumulate to create significant interruptions in user experience. As our latest benchmark report indicates, sites experiencing full-second delays are not uncommon. However, when each call in a transaction adds just a few milliseconds, the aggregated impact can extend to seconds, which users perceive as frustratingly slow. In a world where "slow is the new down," companies will treat sub-second optimizations as the gold standard, investing in advanced tools to monitor and minimize these incremental delays and to maintain a seamless, high-speed digital experience for customers.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MONITORING

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Moves to Center Stage: As hybrid infrastructure, AI, and cloud adoption accelerate, DEM will become essential for maintaining seamless digital performance. Companies will see DEM as a competitive edge, moving from reactive fixes to proactive experience management, as Gartner and industry experts spotlight its impact on customer retention and operational resilience.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

In 2025, Digital Experience Management (DEM) will take significant strides as companies increasingly leverage real-time user data and AI to deliver more intuitive, adaptive digital experiences. DEM will move beyond simply tracking engagement or identifying UX tweaks — it will begin to anticipate user needs and adjust interfaces to offer smoother, more supportive interactions. For example, platforms may start to recognize moments of user frustration and proactively suggest helpful resources or minor adjustments that improve usability on the spot. As companies invest in these advanced DEM tools, they'll become better equipped to meet shifting customer expectations, fostering stronger user satisfaction and loyalty. While there's more to achieve, 2025 will be a pivotal year in setting new standards for digital experiences that adapt to the user in real time.
David Hunter
CEO, Local Falcon

INTERNET STACK MANAGEMENT

Digital Experience Becomes a Business Imperative, Powered by a Strong Internet Infrastructure: Digital experience will emerge as a critical pillar of business success, supported by robust internet infrastructure. Each layer of the internet stack — DNS, APIs, CDNs, and other foundational components — will serve as the backbone of IT operations, ensuring the performance and reliability needed for an optimal digital experience. As businesses increasingly depend on seamless digital interactions, monitoring and optimizing these layers will become as essential as financial oversight. Companies will prioritize internet stack management to safeguard digital experience, recognizing it as a key driver of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business growth.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

MOBILE APM TRANSFORMS INTO MOBILE DEX

In 2025, Mobile Application Performance Management (APM) will transform into a comprehensive Mobile Digital Employee Experience (DEX) framework, reshaping the digital landscape for both customer and employee experiences. As mobile devices become primary work tools, the demand for seamless, uninterrupted performance will make real-time monitoring essential for detecting and resolving issues instantly. Mobile DEX will go beyond traditional performance metrics to prioritize battery life optimization, data usage minimization, and resource efficiency, directly supporting employee productivity throughout the workday. Additionally, this shift will emphasize employee satisfaction, incorporating real-time feedback and indicators like device health, Wi-Fi strength, and overall device usability to create a more holistic view of the mobile experience. This evolution will position mobile DEX as a strategic advantage, aligning mobile technology with the dynamic needs of today's workforce and making the mobile digital experience a crucial driver of employee satisfaction and productivity in the modern workplace.
Colleen Marinelli
Senior Product Marketing Manager, DEM, Riverbed

EUEM EVOLVES INTO DEX

In 2025, End-User Experience Management (EUEM) will evolve into a broader Digital Employee Experience (DEX) framework, reflecting a shift towards a holistic view of the employee's digital environment. While EUEM has traditionally focused on application and device performance, DEX expands this to encompass the full spectrum of digital interactions employees have with technology, making employee experience a core priority. Leveraging AI and machine learning, DEX will provide highly personalized, automated support, proactively resolving issues before they impact productivity. Real-time feedback loops will empower employees to report satisfaction and issues instantly, refining performance analytics and generating valuable insights into the digital experience. This comprehensive approach will unify the technology ecosystem, focusing not only on productivity but also on fostering employee satisfaction by prioritizing a seamless, supportive digital experience. As hybrid and remote work redefine the modern workplace, DEX will enable organizations to provide proactive, meaningful support that meets the evolving needs of employees, solidifying the digital experience as a central factor in workplace success. 
Colleen Marinelli
Senior Product Marketing Manager, DEM, Riverbed

Hybrid Workforce Becomes Permanent

Since the pandemic receded, businesses of all kinds have pursued a hybrid path — with some work being done from offices, and some from home or other remote locations. On one extreme are companies such as JPMorgan, which requires senior leaders to return to the office five days a week — but they are now an outlier. Some large technology companies have implemented policies requiring their people to spend at least two days per week in the office. But that means people are free to work from remote offices like a WeWork or a home office for the other three days. This increases the need for secure endpoint protections to safeguard those remote employees. Even in this scenario, employees are working outside of the office more often than in the office — a big shift from pre-pandemic working environments. Many observers thought there would be a big return wave when everyone goes back into the office, but that is not happening. Hybrid work is here to stay, whether at big, midsize, or small companies. That poses a real challenge for IT teams to manage endpoint devices and ensure that everyone has a consistent experience no matter where they are working.
Doug Murray
CEO, Auvik

Work-from-anywhere isn't going anywhere. Forward thinking companies are taking the lessons they learned from supporting home workers through the pandemic to create more efficient work environments for employees out of the office. Despite the media attention on some large company return to work mandates in 2024, more than two-thirds of US employers have some type of remote work flexibility. Expect this trend to continue through 2025 and beyond for two reasons. First, Gen Z, the first true digital-first generation is fast becoming the primary new talent pool. Second, secure remote connectivity now offers the speed, performance, and security to match the in-office environment.
Prakash Mana
CEO, Cloudbrink

HYBRID WORK ADVANCES TELEMETRY DATA

Hybrid work has significantly advanced the availability of telemetry data for IT Ops Analytics, which will only continue to increase as more organizations return to the office in 2025. How people connect with each other, where they physically are when they connect, and the IT friction they face are all data that can be used to inform future planning, as well as IT and facilities investment priorities. Consider looking to integrations in existing software platforms (i.e. Microsoft Teams Rooms data) as a new source of telemetry that can power ITOps analytics.
Daniel Root
Head of Global Strategic Alliances, Barco ClickShare

HYBRID WORK DRIVES INNOVATION IN DEVICE MANAGEMENT

The hybrid work model will hit a tipping point, as employers push for more in-office presence while employees increasingly demand flexibility. This growing divide will catalyze innovation in device management. Many companies have already invested in streamlining onboarding and remote support, but now the challenge will be adapting those systems to also serve in-office environments. The key will be prioritizing automation and efficiency which reduces the need for manual fixes and enhances the user experience across all work settings. As businesses navigate this tension, the future of device management will focus on creating seamless and flexible solutions that balance both employee autonomy and the need for in-person collaboration.
Weldon Dodd
Evangelist and SVP, Global Partnerships, Kandji

Go to: 2025 Observability Predictions - Part 6

 

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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? ...

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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

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2025 Observability Predictions - Part 5

In APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer predictions on how Observability and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2025. Part 5 covers user experience, Digital Experience Management (DEM) and the hybrid workforce.

Re-engineering user experience in the age of AI

Customers have always been a priority, but there is another group of stakeholders that are equally as important to an enterprise's success — its employees. However, the exponential rise of emerging tech like GenAI and the pressure to adopt this tech has thrown the user experience into disarray. Now is the time for companies to invest in re-imagining and redesigning their existing technology architecture. While the upfront cost might seem steep, their business's long-term success depends on it.
Rajesh Ganesan
President, ManageEngine

ManageEngine


MILLISECONDS - THE NEW STANDARD FOR DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

Milliseconds Define the New Standard for Uptime and User Experience: Milliseconds will become a critical metric for digital performance, as even slight delays accumulate to create significant interruptions in user experience. As our latest benchmark report indicates, sites experiencing full-second delays are not uncommon. However, when each call in a transaction adds just a few milliseconds, the aggregated impact can extend to seconds, which users perceive as frustratingly slow. In a world where "slow is the new down," companies will treat sub-second optimizations as the gold standard, investing in advanced tools to monitor and minimize these incremental delays and to maintain a seamless, high-speed digital experience for customers.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MONITORING

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Moves to Center Stage: As hybrid infrastructure, AI, and cloud adoption accelerate, DEM will become essential for maintaining seamless digital performance. Companies will see DEM as a competitive edge, moving from reactive fixes to proactive experience management, as Gartner and industry experts spotlight its impact on customer retention and operational resilience.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

In 2025, Digital Experience Management (DEM) will take significant strides as companies increasingly leverage real-time user data and AI to deliver more intuitive, adaptive digital experiences. DEM will move beyond simply tracking engagement or identifying UX tweaks — it will begin to anticipate user needs and adjust interfaces to offer smoother, more supportive interactions. For example, platforms may start to recognize moments of user frustration and proactively suggest helpful resources or minor adjustments that improve usability on the spot. As companies invest in these advanced DEM tools, they'll become better equipped to meet shifting customer expectations, fostering stronger user satisfaction and loyalty. While there's more to achieve, 2025 will be a pivotal year in setting new standards for digital experiences that adapt to the user in real time.
David Hunter
CEO, Local Falcon

INTERNET STACK MANAGEMENT

Digital Experience Becomes a Business Imperative, Powered by a Strong Internet Infrastructure: Digital experience will emerge as a critical pillar of business success, supported by robust internet infrastructure. Each layer of the internet stack — DNS, APIs, CDNs, and other foundational components — will serve as the backbone of IT operations, ensuring the performance and reliability needed for an optimal digital experience. As businesses increasingly depend on seamless digital interactions, monitoring and optimizing these layers will become as essential as financial oversight. Companies will prioritize internet stack management to safeguard digital experience, recognizing it as a key driver of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business growth.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

MOBILE APM TRANSFORMS INTO MOBILE DEX

In 2025, Mobile Application Performance Management (APM) will transform into a comprehensive Mobile Digital Employee Experience (DEX) framework, reshaping the digital landscape for both customer and employee experiences. As mobile devices become primary work tools, the demand for seamless, uninterrupted performance will make real-time monitoring essential for detecting and resolving issues instantly. Mobile DEX will go beyond traditional performance metrics to prioritize battery life optimization, data usage minimization, and resource efficiency, directly supporting employee productivity throughout the workday. Additionally, this shift will emphasize employee satisfaction, incorporating real-time feedback and indicators like device health, Wi-Fi strength, and overall device usability to create a more holistic view of the mobile experience. This evolution will position mobile DEX as a strategic advantage, aligning mobile technology with the dynamic needs of today's workforce and making the mobile digital experience a crucial driver of employee satisfaction and productivity in the modern workplace.
Colleen Marinelli
Senior Product Marketing Manager, DEM, Riverbed

EUEM EVOLVES INTO DEX

In 2025, End-User Experience Management (EUEM) will evolve into a broader Digital Employee Experience (DEX) framework, reflecting a shift towards a holistic view of the employee's digital environment. While EUEM has traditionally focused on application and device performance, DEX expands this to encompass the full spectrum of digital interactions employees have with technology, making employee experience a core priority. Leveraging AI and machine learning, DEX will provide highly personalized, automated support, proactively resolving issues before they impact productivity. Real-time feedback loops will empower employees to report satisfaction and issues instantly, refining performance analytics and generating valuable insights into the digital experience. This comprehensive approach will unify the technology ecosystem, focusing not only on productivity but also on fostering employee satisfaction by prioritizing a seamless, supportive digital experience. As hybrid and remote work redefine the modern workplace, DEX will enable organizations to provide proactive, meaningful support that meets the evolving needs of employees, solidifying the digital experience as a central factor in workplace success. 
Colleen Marinelli
Senior Product Marketing Manager, DEM, Riverbed

Hybrid Workforce Becomes Permanent

Since the pandemic receded, businesses of all kinds have pursued a hybrid path — with some work being done from offices, and some from home or other remote locations. On one extreme are companies such as JPMorgan, which requires senior leaders to return to the office five days a week — but they are now an outlier. Some large technology companies have implemented policies requiring their people to spend at least two days per week in the office. But that means people are free to work from remote offices like a WeWork or a home office for the other three days. This increases the need for secure endpoint protections to safeguard those remote employees. Even in this scenario, employees are working outside of the office more often than in the office — a big shift from pre-pandemic working environments. Many observers thought there would be a big return wave when everyone goes back into the office, but that is not happening. Hybrid work is here to stay, whether at big, midsize, or small companies. That poses a real challenge for IT teams to manage endpoint devices and ensure that everyone has a consistent experience no matter where they are working.
Doug Murray
CEO, Auvik

Work-from-anywhere isn't going anywhere. Forward thinking companies are taking the lessons they learned from supporting home workers through the pandemic to create more efficient work environments for employees out of the office. Despite the media attention on some large company return to work mandates in 2024, more than two-thirds of US employers have some type of remote work flexibility. Expect this trend to continue through 2025 and beyond for two reasons. First, Gen Z, the first true digital-first generation is fast becoming the primary new talent pool. Second, secure remote connectivity now offers the speed, performance, and security to match the in-office environment.
Prakash Mana
CEO, Cloudbrink

HYBRID WORK ADVANCES TELEMETRY DATA

Hybrid work has significantly advanced the availability of telemetry data for IT Ops Analytics, which will only continue to increase as more organizations return to the office in 2025. How people connect with each other, where they physically are when they connect, and the IT friction they face are all data that can be used to inform future planning, as well as IT and facilities investment priorities. Consider looking to integrations in existing software platforms (i.e. Microsoft Teams Rooms data) as a new source of telemetry that can power ITOps analytics.
Daniel Root
Head of Global Strategic Alliances, Barco ClickShare

HYBRID WORK DRIVES INNOVATION IN DEVICE MANAGEMENT

The hybrid work model will hit a tipping point, as employers push for more in-office presence while employees increasingly demand flexibility. This growing divide will catalyze innovation in device management. Many companies have already invested in streamlining onboarding and remote support, but now the challenge will be adapting those systems to also serve in-office environments. The key will be prioritizing automation and efficiency which reduces the need for manual fixes and enhances the user experience across all work settings. As businesses navigate this tension, the future of device management will focus on creating seamless and flexible solutions that balance both employee autonomy and the need for in-person collaboration.
Weldon Dodd
Evangelist and SVP, Global Partnerships, Kandji

Go to: 2025 Observability Predictions - Part 6

 

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 ...