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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

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...