Application Performance Management (APM) technologies have evolved quickly over the past few years and, will no doubt, continue to accelerate during the coming years. One key area which APM vendors have to recognize is a current weakness that must be quickly addressed is that the compelling business driver is not just ensuring the health, availability, and performance of "applications" but the business services which they support.
The business service can be defined as one or more applications which provide a discrete service assessable by a user (internal or external) or a another application PLUS the underlying service delivery infrastructure. The latter presents the gap when it comes to the focus of the majority of current APM vendors. While an application(s) may be performing well, the business service may be unavailable due to blade failure on a database server (for example).
The dependency between Application Performance and Business Service Performance must include a view into the health of the entire "full stack." Most APM vendors have obviously approached the "problem" from the perspective of the application. Indeed, some APM vendors are optimized for Java environments, others specialize in .Net environments, still some are focused on enterprise COTS packages, such as SAP or Siebel. With such a wide array of diversity in the "application" realm, it's little wonder why most APM vendors have heretofore neglected the supporting service delivery infrastructure.
IT organizations are demanding a full stack, business service-oriented solution. The first vendors that get there with a complete story (and, more importantly, a complete set of capabilities) will be favored to win the long-term APM vendor race.
Bob Johnson is CMO of Optanix.