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APM Evolution: Business Service Performance

Bob Johnson

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.

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APM Evolution: Business Service Performance

Bob Johnson

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.

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 ...

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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 ...