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5 Reasons Application Performance Management Fails

Jonah Kowall

After speaking to thousands of Application Performance Management (APM) users during my time with Gartner, I have seen the following 5 key issues that cause APM failures:

1. Organizational immaturity

The first cause of failure is the silos in many of today’s organizations. There are often too many stakeholders involved in APM decision-making, ranging from application support, server teams, network teams, database teams (DBAs), application developers, and various architects across the organization.

We’re also seeing more non-technical users, such as the business owner of an application interested in seeing usage and performance data on critical Business Transactions within the application. These business users will become a more central user of APM in the future.

It’s critical to identify the primary user of the product, and determine requirements focused on those primary users. Secondary users can have input but should not be the ones driving the key decision points. As products mature, they can sell into multiple areas or even cross sell through teams, but it shouldn’t be the focus of the initial implementation.

2. Ownership

Typically the excitement of an APM solution, the added visibility, and capabilities presented with an implementation provide immense value to operations, application support, and development. The implementation — if you select an easy to implement product — normally proceeds without many issues, and there is a clear owner or stakeholders of the product.

Over time, as roles and business direction changes, often APM loses its key owner. The result of this is that the product isn’t maintained or used day to day. The way to avoid this is to make the executives key stakeholders. As APM and Application Intelligence will become critical to business decision-making, changing what’s often been the fate of older APM products.

3. Application Complexity

APM tools are installed for two reasons. If APM is strategic it’s implemented during development or implementation of a project. The second driver for APM implementation is when the pain threshold gets too high, and something is needed to see the production environment to remediate issues. The lack of understanding or visibility in applications, both old and new, is normally the first benefit. You’ll often hear: “I didn’t know this was connecting to that?”

Issues occur within changing applications for two primary reasons. First, demands of business model changes driven by greater customer demand or higher volumes of data. The second reason for change is feature requests, requiring application changes. These two reasons for change can be distilled down to scale and complexity, making it harder to identify and correct issues (or passing this data to development to make corrective changes to the software).

4. Engineering Skills Required

With yesterday’s APM tools, the implementations were incredibly complex and time consuming. This was due to the amount of tuning and customization enterprises required. Companies which have failed in APM were normally due to having too heavy a services engagement. This has caused the likes of Optier to completely go out of business, and ITOM giants to rethink how they approach the market. Many of these companies even have staff members who would work full time at customer sites to keep the products up and running. These are often seen as benefits to the buyer, but eventually they become burdens.

Applications both in the enterprise and customer worlds have become easy to buy, implement, and show the value of the technology. This has permeated IT products as well. Buyers expect things to be easy and show value quickly. The APM winners today, and for the future build easy to implement products, and refuse to customize them or push a heavy services engagement.

The key is enabling customers, and not offloading the work of using the product or providing staff augmentation. If you are looking at managed services, select the right technology first, and then the managed services provider.

Many legacy APM tools are far too complex, with countless config files and GUI features to tune in order to get value out of the investment. You shouldn’t need to be a senior technologist to get results. Today’s modern tools are easy to understand, and often present information in a way that level-1 operations engineers get value from them.

5. Focus on the wrong thing

Selecting APM technology isn’t just about meeting the needs of your application today, but thinking about the future state of the applications and infrastructures. What is considered experimental and bleeding edge eventually become standard components of traditional enterprise applications. We’ve already seen this happen with PHP, and we’re beginning to see this with other languages. Today you may be a Java shop on VMware, and possibly even a PHP user on LAMP, but in the future you will likely be a node.js shop, possibly running on a public PaaS.

Most organizational leaders have a strategy for both private and public cloud, where areas of business innovation and differentiation tend to be built on public clouds. This is the reason Gartner states that “IT spending on public cloud services is growing more than five times faster than growth in IT spending across all categories.”

Similarly, your organization may not have a large mobile investment today, but I can assure you will in the future. In order to handle these shifts many applications are moving from a single programming language to being composed of multiple languages. These technology shifts are requiring people with new broader skills, or people who can learn new skills quickly. The path towards the full stack developer or IT operations generalist show many are evolving to meet these new challenges to meet business agility requirements.

Regardless whether these proof points or discussions match your organization, the ability to support past investments, existing investments, but most importantly future investments, is critical when selecting APM technologies. Areas of growth and innovation are critical to senior management, hence will provide the most value to the business. These challenges are being addressed by the APM innovators. Keep that in mind when selecting application management technology, keeping in mind the depth and context of the monitoring and analytics.

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5 Reasons Application Performance Management Fails

Jonah Kowall

After speaking to thousands of Application Performance Management (APM) users during my time with Gartner, I have seen the following 5 key issues that cause APM failures:

1. Organizational immaturity

The first cause of failure is the silos in many of today’s organizations. There are often too many stakeholders involved in APM decision-making, ranging from application support, server teams, network teams, database teams (DBAs), application developers, and various architects across the organization.

We’re also seeing more non-technical users, such as the business owner of an application interested in seeing usage and performance data on critical Business Transactions within the application. These business users will become a more central user of APM in the future.

It’s critical to identify the primary user of the product, and determine requirements focused on those primary users. Secondary users can have input but should not be the ones driving the key decision points. As products mature, they can sell into multiple areas or even cross sell through teams, but it shouldn’t be the focus of the initial implementation.

2. Ownership

Typically the excitement of an APM solution, the added visibility, and capabilities presented with an implementation provide immense value to operations, application support, and development. The implementation — if you select an easy to implement product — normally proceeds without many issues, and there is a clear owner or stakeholders of the product.

Over time, as roles and business direction changes, often APM loses its key owner. The result of this is that the product isn’t maintained or used day to day. The way to avoid this is to make the executives key stakeholders. As APM and Application Intelligence will become critical to business decision-making, changing what’s often been the fate of older APM products.

3. Application Complexity

APM tools are installed for two reasons. If APM is strategic it’s implemented during development or implementation of a project. The second driver for APM implementation is when the pain threshold gets too high, and something is needed to see the production environment to remediate issues. The lack of understanding or visibility in applications, both old and new, is normally the first benefit. You’ll often hear: “I didn’t know this was connecting to that?”

Issues occur within changing applications for two primary reasons. First, demands of business model changes driven by greater customer demand or higher volumes of data. The second reason for change is feature requests, requiring application changes. These two reasons for change can be distilled down to scale and complexity, making it harder to identify and correct issues (or passing this data to development to make corrective changes to the software).

4. Engineering Skills Required

With yesterday’s APM tools, the implementations were incredibly complex and time consuming. This was due to the amount of tuning and customization enterprises required. Companies which have failed in APM were normally due to having too heavy a services engagement. This has caused the likes of Optier to completely go out of business, and ITOM giants to rethink how they approach the market. Many of these companies even have staff members who would work full time at customer sites to keep the products up and running. These are often seen as benefits to the buyer, but eventually they become burdens.

Applications both in the enterprise and customer worlds have become easy to buy, implement, and show the value of the technology. This has permeated IT products as well. Buyers expect things to be easy and show value quickly. The APM winners today, and for the future build easy to implement products, and refuse to customize them or push a heavy services engagement.

The key is enabling customers, and not offloading the work of using the product or providing staff augmentation. If you are looking at managed services, select the right technology first, and then the managed services provider.

Many legacy APM tools are far too complex, with countless config files and GUI features to tune in order to get value out of the investment. You shouldn’t need to be a senior technologist to get results. Today’s modern tools are easy to understand, and often present information in a way that level-1 operations engineers get value from them.

5. Focus on the wrong thing

Selecting APM technology isn’t just about meeting the needs of your application today, but thinking about the future state of the applications and infrastructures. What is considered experimental and bleeding edge eventually become standard components of traditional enterprise applications. We’ve already seen this happen with PHP, and we’re beginning to see this with other languages. Today you may be a Java shop on VMware, and possibly even a PHP user on LAMP, but in the future you will likely be a node.js shop, possibly running on a public PaaS.

Most organizational leaders have a strategy for both private and public cloud, where areas of business innovation and differentiation tend to be built on public clouds. This is the reason Gartner states that “IT spending on public cloud services is growing more than five times faster than growth in IT spending across all categories.”

Similarly, your organization may not have a large mobile investment today, but I can assure you will in the future. In order to handle these shifts many applications are moving from a single programming language to being composed of multiple languages. These technology shifts are requiring people with new broader skills, or people who can learn new skills quickly. The path towards the full stack developer or IT operations generalist show many are evolving to meet these new challenges to meet business agility requirements.

Regardless whether these proof points or discussions match your organization, the ability to support past investments, existing investments, but most importantly future investments, is critical when selecting APM technologies. Areas of growth and innovation are critical to senior management, hence will provide the most value to the business. These challenges are being addressed by the APM innovators. Keep that in mind when selecting application management technology, keeping in mind the depth and context of the monitoring and analytics.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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