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APIs and CD: Rekindling Interest in APM - Part 2

Julie Craig

Start with APIs and CD: Rekindling Interest in APM - Part 1

The findings outlined in Part 1 of this blog point to a need for "smart" Application Performance Management (APM) solutions supporting automation of change monitoring, performance and availability management, and production troubleshooting functions. With such capabilities in place, Dev and Ops resources could be freed up to deliver the new software products that have become the lifeblood of the agile business.

Taken together, these findings make a strong case for APM investments. They also make a strong case for refocusing on APM as a research topic during 2016. I am currently in the process of developing a survey supporting a new research report to be delivered in mid-to-late June. Thanks to Apica, BMC and Riverbed for sponsoring the upcoming 2016 EMA APM research study entitled APM in the Digital Economy: What's Hot, What's Not and What's On the Horizon?

The study will investigate the types of capabilities IT organizations are seeking in a new generation of APM solutions as mobile applications, API-driven applications, containers, and streaming technologies hit mainstream. One important factor for IT organizations to keep in mind as they consider APM investments is the distinction between the monitoring and management functions, i.e. "Application Performance Monitoring" versus "Application Performance Management." The two differ primarily in two functional areas: depth of coverage and the sophistication of the analytics and other features supporting autonomy in problem detection and resolution.

The role of application monitoring is to quantify, correlate, store, and report granular metrics underlying end-to-end application/transaction execution. The management function goes a step further and begins to take over the expertise-driven analytical tasks traditionally done by human IT practitioners. Advanced APM solutions — in which the "M" stands for "Management" — add the analytics and deep-dive transaction visibility necessary to actually identify, at high levels of certainty, the actual root cause of performance or availability issues.

Features supporting the management function in today's leading-edge APM solutions include the ability to "learn" from environmental factors and use this learning to detect departures from normal behavior. Other features include predictive analytics supporting notification of impending issues/failures, along with autonomic capabilities supporting automated resolution (if a company chooses to take advantage of this functionality). However, perhaps the most important feature associated with these solutions is automation of the process of formulating insights from data and using those insights to draw accurate conclusions relating to "how do we fix it?"

While human experts have historically performed this function, automated products can do so far faster and more efficiently than their human counterparts.

From this perspective, investments in quality APM solutions can eliminate many of the production support tasks that are consuming the bandwidth of Dev and Ops teams. This, in turn, frees up these teams to deliver new software products and services at the fast pace necessary to achieve software-related business objectives.

Stay tuned for the research report, which is scheduled to be published in mid-June, and for the related webinar, currently scheduled for July 12.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

APIs and CD: Rekindling Interest in APM - Part 2

Julie Craig

Start with APIs and CD: Rekindling Interest in APM - Part 1

The findings outlined in Part 1 of this blog point to a need for "smart" Application Performance Management (APM) solutions supporting automation of change monitoring, performance and availability management, and production troubleshooting functions. With such capabilities in place, Dev and Ops resources could be freed up to deliver the new software products that have become the lifeblood of the agile business.

Taken together, these findings make a strong case for APM investments. They also make a strong case for refocusing on APM as a research topic during 2016. I am currently in the process of developing a survey supporting a new research report to be delivered in mid-to-late June. Thanks to Apica, BMC and Riverbed for sponsoring the upcoming 2016 EMA APM research study entitled APM in the Digital Economy: What's Hot, What's Not and What's On the Horizon?

The study will investigate the types of capabilities IT organizations are seeking in a new generation of APM solutions as mobile applications, API-driven applications, containers, and streaming technologies hit mainstream. One important factor for IT organizations to keep in mind as they consider APM investments is the distinction between the monitoring and management functions, i.e. "Application Performance Monitoring" versus "Application Performance Management." The two differ primarily in two functional areas: depth of coverage and the sophistication of the analytics and other features supporting autonomy in problem detection and resolution.

The role of application monitoring is to quantify, correlate, store, and report granular metrics underlying end-to-end application/transaction execution. The management function goes a step further and begins to take over the expertise-driven analytical tasks traditionally done by human IT practitioners. Advanced APM solutions — in which the "M" stands for "Management" — add the analytics and deep-dive transaction visibility necessary to actually identify, at high levels of certainty, the actual root cause of performance or availability issues.

Features supporting the management function in today's leading-edge APM solutions include the ability to "learn" from environmental factors and use this learning to detect departures from normal behavior. Other features include predictive analytics supporting notification of impending issues/failures, along with autonomic capabilities supporting automated resolution (if a company chooses to take advantage of this functionality). However, perhaps the most important feature associated with these solutions is automation of the process of formulating insights from data and using those insights to draw accurate conclusions relating to "how do we fix it?"

While human experts have historically performed this function, automated products can do so far faster and more efficiently than their human counterparts.

From this perspective, investments in quality APM solutions can eliminate many of the production support tasks that are consuming the bandwidth of Dev and Ops teams. This, in turn, frees up these teams to deliver new software products and services at the fast pace necessary to achieve software-related business objectives.

Stay tuned for the research report, which is scheduled to be published in mid-June, and for the related webinar, currently scheduled for July 12.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...