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A Wish List for a Best in Class APM Solution

Jim Young

APM solutions abound. Some strong in cloud, others in on-prem. Some offer slick visualization, others masses of feature function. Some providing an excellent eagle-eye view, and others offering exceptional drill-down functionality. But there is no "best of all worlds" - there are major gaps in each offering. The only solution appears to be a mix and match of unintegrated products, often from a variety of vendors.

And so, I've come up with a wish-list of features that I would like to see in a true best-in-class APM solution:

- Manages performance, availability, and capacity for complex application infrastructures.

- Gives visibility, control, and automation for mission-critical applications.

- Performs equally well in on-prem, cloud and hybrid environments.

- Manages mobile applications.

- Deep-dive diagnostics.

- Intuitive user interface, offering a single point of entry.
Modular design and extensibility.

- Flexible deployment options.

- Quick time to value.

- Ability to monitor the latest platforms - Ruby, MongoDB ...

... and a partridge in a pear tree.

Jim Young is Information Development Manager, IBM Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure

Related Links:

www.ibm.com

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Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

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FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

A Wish List for a Best in Class APM Solution

Jim Young

APM solutions abound. Some strong in cloud, others in on-prem. Some offer slick visualization, others masses of feature function. Some providing an excellent eagle-eye view, and others offering exceptional drill-down functionality. But there is no "best of all worlds" - there are major gaps in each offering. The only solution appears to be a mix and match of unintegrated products, often from a variety of vendors.

And so, I've come up with a wish-list of features that I would like to see in a true best-in-class APM solution:

- Manages performance, availability, and capacity for complex application infrastructures.

- Gives visibility, control, and automation for mission-critical applications.

- Performs equally well in on-prem, cloud and hybrid environments.

- Manages mobile applications.

- Deep-dive diagnostics.

- Intuitive user interface, offering a single point of entry.
Modular design and extensibility.

- Flexible deployment options.

- Quick time to value.

- Ability to monitor the latest platforms - Ruby, MongoDB ...

... and a partridge in a pear tree.

Jim Young is Information Development Manager, IBM Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure

Related Links:

www.ibm.com

Hot Topics

The Latest

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
Cisco

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...