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3 Focus Points for Future of Application Management

Arun Biligiri

I recently spent time talking with three clients about the future of the application lifecycle. The common question I got was, "Tell me what to expect with APM of the future." I'm sure this is a question on the minds of many people who manage the performance of critical business applications.

Applications are continually expanding the frequency and types of measurement data that provide real-time status. Gone are the days when information was sparse and difficult to handle. Today's information is easily available and in multiple structured and unstructured forms. Now information is available through logs, metrics, events, change, topology and activities. While in the past this was on the order of 5-15 minutes, information is now available multiple times a minute. Such information is a rich source of untapped insights.

Applications are being promoted to production more frequently. Past updates were made on the order of months. Applications are now being updated in days and weeks, resulting in Continuous Delivery supported by DevOps. Applications need to be managed throughout the continuous delivery cycle and no longer separately in development, staging or production. Apps are now being driven into production every day, bringing in a new set of challenges.

In order to drive Continuous Delivery, applications are being built in highly dynamic cloud environments. These cloud environments mostly rely on traditional on-prem transaction systems, which are reliable, scalable, highly secure and fully auditable. It is almost guaranteed that your critical applications will be hybrid from the start.

All this means Application Performance Management (APM) is fundamentally changing. Traditional rules and requirements don't apply anymore. Adapting to changes in the industry, APM needs to focus on 3 distinct areas:

Cognitive APM Should be on Your Radar

With the expansion of measurement data, it is practically impossible to derive insights using traditional manual techniques. Foundationally, APM solutions have to build on cognitive and analytic foundations. APM solutions need to be able to learn patterns and predict problems before they happen, as well as suggest and automate actions with a high rate of reliability. Cognitive systems are enabling real-time APM.

APM is an integral part of DevOps

APM is not just applicable to production systems and not simply a tool for IT Ops. With the advent of DevOps, APM needs to be introduced at the development phase to enable the verification of production readiness across code releases, validation of production scale, and establishment of production acceptability guidelines. Effectively, APM is the glue that ties together the building, running and managing of applications. This accelerates DevOps and gives development and operations a common language to communicate.

Managing hybrid environments

APM views have traditionally been in siloes, with multiple solutions stuck together to deliver a larger value proposition with limited success. Lately, that same concept is driving the emergence of tools specializing in cloud and new workloads, primarily open-source based.

Then we have traditional on-premises middleware being managed by older APM systems, furthering the silos of information. Focusing on depth of APM capabilities in Cloud rather than breadth of monitoring (Hybrid Cloud) only creates more complexity in APM, contrary to delivering on ROI. APM solutions need to support fully hybrid workloads and give one view to be really useful.

Accomplishing these 3 things will make APM truly helpful in enabling digital transformation. APM in this digital era is morphing into an intelligent ecosystem of solutions that goes well beyond traditional use cases, meaning APM should expand significantly in the future.

Arun Biligiri is APM Offering Management Leader at IBM.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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3 Focus Points for Future of Application Management

Arun Biligiri

I recently spent time talking with three clients about the future of the application lifecycle. The common question I got was, "Tell me what to expect with APM of the future." I'm sure this is a question on the minds of many people who manage the performance of critical business applications.

Applications are continually expanding the frequency and types of measurement data that provide real-time status. Gone are the days when information was sparse and difficult to handle. Today's information is easily available and in multiple structured and unstructured forms. Now information is available through logs, metrics, events, change, topology and activities. While in the past this was on the order of 5-15 minutes, information is now available multiple times a minute. Such information is a rich source of untapped insights.

Applications are being promoted to production more frequently. Past updates were made on the order of months. Applications are now being updated in days and weeks, resulting in Continuous Delivery supported by DevOps. Applications need to be managed throughout the continuous delivery cycle and no longer separately in development, staging or production. Apps are now being driven into production every day, bringing in a new set of challenges.

In order to drive Continuous Delivery, applications are being built in highly dynamic cloud environments. These cloud environments mostly rely on traditional on-prem transaction systems, which are reliable, scalable, highly secure and fully auditable. It is almost guaranteed that your critical applications will be hybrid from the start.

All this means Application Performance Management (APM) is fundamentally changing. Traditional rules and requirements don't apply anymore. Adapting to changes in the industry, APM needs to focus on 3 distinct areas:

Cognitive APM Should be on Your Radar

With the expansion of measurement data, it is practically impossible to derive insights using traditional manual techniques. Foundationally, APM solutions have to build on cognitive and analytic foundations. APM solutions need to be able to learn patterns and predict problems before they happen, as well as suggest and automate actions with a high rate of reliability. Cognitive systems are enabling real-time APM.

APM is an integral part of DevOps

APM is not just applicable to production systems and not simply a tool for IT Ops. With the advent of DevOps, APM needs to be introduced at the development phase to enable the verification of production readiness across code releases, validation of production scale, and establishment of production acceptability guidelines. Effectively, APM is the glue that ties together the building, running and managing of applications. This accelerates DevOps and gives development and operations a common language to communicate.

Managing hybrid environments

APM views have traditionally been in siloes, with multiple solutions stuck together to deliver a larger value proposition with limited success. Lately, that same concept is driving the emergence of tools specializing in cloud and new workloads, primarily open-source based.

Then we have traditional on-premises middleware being managed by older APM systems, furthering the silos of information. Focusing on depth of APM capabilities in Cloud rather than breadth of monitoring (Hybrid Cloud) only creates more complexity in APM, contrary to delivering on ROI. APM solutions need to support fully hybrid workloads and give one view to be really useful.

Accomplishing these 3 things will make APM truly helpful in enabling digital transformation. APM in this digital era is morphing into an intelligent ecosystem of solutions that goes well beyond traditional use cases, meaning APM should expand significantly in the future.

Arun Biligiri is APM Offering Management Leader at IBM.

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...