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3 Takeaways from Velocity New York 2014 - and What This Means for APM

Laura Strassman

While exhibiting with the SmartBear AlertSite UXM team in Velocity last week, I managed to skip away from the booth quite a bit to squeeze in as many sessions as possible. The more sessions I attended, the more some common themes started materializing. The three themes that finally emerged are all very different, but are ultimately all related at the end of the day.


Here they are, my 3 big takeaways from Velocity NY 2014:

1. We live in a complex world of our own making

2. Failure is the nature of complex systems technological or organizational

3. Organizational change is necessary to effect solutions and sustain them

The theme of complexity appeared in several sessions ranging from fixing healthcare.com, to a very academic talk about complex systems, to stories about corporate deployments. There were a few layers to complexity. The first layer was about how as teams concerned with performance we were by our very nature, pushing systems to the edge and introducing complexity. The second layer revolved around how deployments are just so big that organizational complexity is introduced - who manages what? If the pieces are all managed separately, complexity is increased, organizationally.

Which leads directly to a discussion of failure. If we are pushing the edge, and delivering increasingly complex systems, then failures will happen. The nature of the discussion has to change from preventing all failure, to failing gracefully. What do we do when there is a failure? How have we planned, in advance, to handle a failure?

Efficiently handling failure involves a collaborative approach. I know you thought I was going to say that deploying great applications involves a collaborative approach, and it does but I think it’s more crucial for failures. At all the conferences I have been to this year, organization change has been a huge topic. It seems to have two parts to it:

1. Hero/Unicorn culture needs to be replaced by a team culture for the health of the organization and the health of the individual.

2. Performance, by its nature, requires a cross functional approach to be successful.

There seems to be a prominent backlash against the culture of the special individual that takes on heroic efforts and saves the day. I think this is partly due to a maturing of the industry but also there is an inherent conflict between this and the need to work cross functionally to solve problems in complex environments. Several sessions went in depth on this theme.

As I passed the first half dozen APM vendors or so when returning back to the exhibition hall with these themes fresh in my mind, the thought occurred to me that if any of these solutions planned to earn or keep the business of any of these other attendees leaving the same sessions I am, they had better be able to do the following:

1. Make it easier for teams to get their work done. If not help reduce complexity, then at very least you better provide efficient methods to help cope with complexity.

2. Help resolve the inevitable failures quickly.

3. Enhance collaboration, not impede it.

I suspect that APM vendors that fail to deliver on these items might not be exhibiting at Velocity Conferences for too long …


Laura Strassman is Sr. Product Marketing Manager at SmartBear Software.

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3 Takeaways from Velocity New York 2014 - and What This Means for APM

Laura Strassman

While exhibiting with the SmartBear AlertSite UXM team in Velocity last week, I managed to skip away from the booth quite a bit to squeeze in as many sessions as possible. The more sessions I attended, the more some common themes started materializing. The three themes that finally emerged are all very different, but are ultimately all related at the end of the day.


Here they are, my 3 big takeaways from Velocity NY 2014:

1. We live in a complex world of our own making

2. Failure is the nature of complex systems technological or organizational

3. Organizational change is necessary to effect solutions and sustain them

The theme of complexity appeared in several sessions ranging from fixing healthcare.com, to a very academic talk about complex systems, to stories about corporate deployments. There were a few layers to complexity. The first layer was about how as teams concerned with performance we were by our very nature, pushing systems to the edge and introducing complexity. The second layer revolved around how deployments are just so big that organizational complexity is introduced - who manages what? If the pieces are all managed separately, complexity is increased, organizationally.

Which leads directly to a discussion of failure. If we are pushing the edge, and delivering increasingly complex systems, then failures will happen. The nature of the discussion has to change from preventing all failure, to failing gracefully. What do we do when there is a failure? How have we planned, in advance, to handle a failure?

Efficiently handling failure involves a collaborative approach. I know you thought I was going to say that deploying great applications involves a collaborative approach, and it does but I think it’s more crucial for failures. At all the conferences I have been to this year, organization change has been a huge topic. It seems to have two parts to it:

1. Hero/Unicorn culture needs to be replaced by a team culture for the health of the organization and the health of the individual.

2. Performance, by its nature, requires a cross functional approach to be successful.

There seems to be a prominent backlash against the culture of the special individual that takes on heroic efforts and saves the day. I think this is partly due to a maturing of the industry but also there is an inherent conflict between this and the need to work cross functionally to solve problems in complex environments. Several sessions went in depth on this theme.

As I passed the first half dozen APM vendors or so when returning back to the exhibition hall with these themes fresh in my mind, the thought occurred to me that if any of these solutions planned to earn or keep the business of any of these other attendees leaving the same sessions I am, they had better be able to do the following:

1. Make it easier for teams to get their work done. If not help reduce complexity, then at very least you better provide efficient methods to help cope with complexity.

2. Help resolve the inevitable failures quickly.

3. Enhance collaboration, not impede it.

I suspect that APM vendors that fail to deliver on these items might not be exhibiting at Velocity Conferences for too long …


Laura Strassman is Sr. Product Marketing Manager at SmartBear Software.

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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 ...

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 ...