Skip to main content

3 Tips to Gain Executive Buy-In on APM

Larry Dragich

Convincing the astute executive who is cautious in making an impetuous decision on an APM investment can prove to be challenging. Consider the amount of due diligence that is brought to bear in the decision making process. The wide array of APM technologies that need to be reviewed can be intimidating.

The selection criteria for application monitoring doesn't have to be an arduous one, lending credence to the idea that an APM solution can be simplified, understood, and implemented. I'm suggesting that the critical success factors in the adoption of APM center around the End-User-Experience (EUE) and the integration touch points with the Incident Management process.

Focus on highlighting the simple metrics, ease of use, and positive impact that this investment will make to the business.

The following are three points to consider when presenting APM's panoramic view of the enterprise and articulating its benefits.

1. Highlight the Simplicity

Dial it down, and fine tune the message to how the application is performing from a business perspective. The second generation of APM comes with a myriad of metrics, gauges, and dashboards, which can be overwhelming at first glance.

Steer clear of flashy dashboards with dozens of metrics and animated icons that have little true meaning. Present a dashboard that answers critical performance questions in one click or less. Focus on showing basic, easy to understand real-time monitoring metrics.

2. Show Value with Existing Tool-Sets

It is important to show how the APM solution can tie into systems that are in place today, by articulating the big picture, so that IT leaders can conceptualize the value coming from the new solution.

How you articulate the Manager of Managers (MoM) concept and how it will support the overall solution is essential for buy-in. To gain more insight into this overall concept read: APM and MoM – Symbiotic Solution Sets.

3. Get Your Priorities Straight

Begin your quest to clear up the cognitive dissonance your sponsors may have with the need for purchasing multiple technologies in order to provide application monitoring (real business value), and start the process of first understanding what’s important to them.

Don’t let the technical dogma of the APM Model cloud the overall vision you are trying to create. For help on this, read Prioritizing Gartner's APM Model. You want to create the most accurate picture possible and show how an APM solution can complement the existing technologies that are in place today.

Conclusion

How extensible will your APM solution be? If it is flexible enough to integrate ubiquitously, and dynamic enough to be configured rapidly, then you will be poised for expansion and ready to begin monitoring anything that comes your way. This is the essence for APM adoption to become successful by being an integral part of the overall IT solution.

You can contact Larry on LinkedIn.

Related Links:

For more information on the critical success factors in APM adoption and how this centers around the End-User-Experience (EUE), read The Anatomy of APM and the corresponding blog APM’s DNA – Event to Incident Flow.

Prioritizing Gartner's APM Model

Event Management: Reactive, Proactive, or Predictive?

APM and MoM – Symbiotic Solution Sets

Real-Time Monitoring Metrics - The Magical Mundane

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 ...

3 Tips to Gain Executive Buy-In on APM

Larry Dragich

Convincing the astute executive who is cautious in making an impetuous decision on an APM investment can prove to be challenging. Consider the amount of due diligence that is brought to bear in the decision making process. The wide array of APM technologies that need to be reviewed can be intimidating.

The selection criteria for application monitoring doesn't have to be an arduous one, lending credence to the idea that an APM solution can be simplified, understood, and implemented. I'm suggesting that the critical success factors in the adoption of APM center around the End-User-Experience (EUE) and the integration touch points with the Incident Management process.

Focus on highlighting the simple metrics, ease of use, and positive impact that this investment will make to the business.

The following are three points to consider when presenting APM's panoramic view of the enterprise and articulating its benefits.

1. Highlight the Simplicity

Dial it down, and fine tune the message to how the application is performing from a business perspective. The second generation of APM comes with a myriad of metrics, gauges, and dashboards, which can be overwhelming at first glance.

Steer clear of flashy dashboards with dozens of metrics and animated icons that have little true meaning. Present a dashboard that answers critical performance questions in one click or less. Focus on showing basic, easy to understand real-time monitoring metrics.

2. Show Value with Existing Tool-Sets

It is important to show how the APM solution can tie into systems that are in place today, by articulating the big picture, so that IT leaders can conceptualize the value coming from the new solution.

How you articulate the Manager of Managers (MoM) concept and how it will support the overall solution is essential for buy-in. To gain more insight into this overall concept read: APM and MoM – Symbiotic Solution Sets.

3. Get Your Priorities Straight

Begin your quest to clear up the cognitive dissonance your sponsors may have with the need for purchasing multiple technologies in order to provide application monitoring (real business value), and start the process of first understanding what’s important to them.

Don’t let the technical dogma of the APM Model cloud the overall vision you are trying to create. For help on this, read Prioritizing Gartner's APM Model. You want to create the most accurate picture possible and show how an APM solution can complement the existing technologies that are in place today.

Conclusion

How extensible will your APM solution be? If it is flexible enough to integrate ubiquitously, and dynamic enough to be configured rapidly, then you will be poised for expansion and ready to begin monitoring anything that comes your way. This is the essence for APM adoption to become successful by being an integral part of the overall IT solution.

You can contact Larry on LinkedIn.

Related Links:

For more information on the critical success factors in APM adoption and how this centers around the End-User-Experience (EUE), read The Anatomy of APM and the corresponding blog APM’s DNA – Event to Incident Flow.

Prioritizing Gartner's APM Model

Event Management: Reactive, Proactive, or Predictive?

APM and MoM – Symbiotic Solution Sets

Real-Time Monitoring Metrics - The Magical Mundane

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 ...