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APM for Development - Unified Monitoring for IT Ops

Scott Hollis

Ensuring application performance is a never ending task that involves multiple products, features and best practices. There is no one process, feature, or product that does everything. A good place to start is pre-production and production monitoring with both an Application Performance Management (APM) tool and a Unified Monitoring tool.

The APM tool will trace/instrument your application and application server activity and often the end user experience via synthetic transactions. The development team and DevOps folks need this.

The Unified Monitoring tool will monitor the supporting infrastructure. The IT Ops team needs this. DevOps likes it too because it helps make IT Ops more effective, which in turn helps assure application delivery.

More Cost Effective

APM tools do not specialize in infrastructure monitoring like unified monitoring solutions do, and unified monitoring solutions do not provide application monitoring depth and diagnostics like the APM tools do. And on top of that, the different audiences need different information.

The best approach is to buy APM for the most critical applications. Most organizations use APM for 10% - 15% of their applications. It is too expensive to buy it for everything. Then for the second tier applications that need some monitoring, they use the unified monitoring solution. It is much less expensive and if you select one with synthetic transaction capability you can get "good enough" end user experience monitoring to know whether or not the application is performing well or not.

Service-Centric is Key

When it comes to unified monitoring, it is important to understand that most unified monitoring vendors provide endpoint monitoring. With endpoint monitoring alone, it is impossible to provide highly accurate root-cause isolation. And they don't identify which service, or application, is impacted. And they can't tell you the extent of the impact. Is it just at risk without impacting application delivery yet OR is it down OR is it somewhere in between?

Be sure the unified monitoring vendor is service-centric and models relationships between components, and that it identifies root-cause; the service or application impacted; and the extent of the impact. This can save hours when there is an outage.

Better yet, by identifying when services are at risk, this can help you to proactively identify and address issues before services/application delivery is impacted.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

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Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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APM for Development - Unified Monitoring for IT Ops

Scott Hollis

Ensuring application performance is a never ending task that involves multiple products, features and best practices. There is no one process, feature, or product that does everything. A good place to start is pre-production and production monitoring with both an Application Performance Management (APM) tool and a Unified Monitoring tool.

The APM tool will trace/instrument your application and application server activity and often the end user experience via synthetic transactions. The development team and DevOps folks need this.

The Unified Monitoring tool will monitor the supporting infrastructure. The IT Ops team needs this. DevOps likes it too because it helps make IT Ops more effective, which in turn helps assure application delivery.

More Cost Effective

APM tools do not specialize in infrastructure monitoring like unified monitoring solutions do, and unified monitoring solutions do not provide application monitoring depth and diagnostics like the APM tools do. And on top of that, the different audiences need different information.

The best approach is to buy APM for the most critical applications. Most organizations use APM for 10% - 15% of their applications. It is too expensive to buy it for everything. Then for the second tier applications that need some monitoring, they use the unified monitoring solution. It is much less expensive and if you select one with synthetic transaction capability you can get "good enough" end user experience monitoring to know whether or not the application is performing well or not.

Service-Centric is Key

When it comes to unified monitoring, it is important to understand that most unified monitoring vendors provide endpoint monitoring. With endpoint monitoring alone, it is impossible to provide highly accurate root-cause isolation. And they don't identify which service, or application, is impacted. And they can't tell you the extent of the impact. Is it just at risk without impacting application delivery yet OR is it down OR is it somewhere in between?

Be sure the unified monitoring vendor is service-centric and models relationships between components, and that it identifies root-cause; the service or application impacted; and the extent of the impact. This can save hours when there is an outage.

Better yet, by identifying when services are at risk, this can help you to proactively identify and address issues before services/application delivery is impacted.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Today's modern systems are not what they once were. Organizations now rely on distributed systems, event-driven workflows, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and continuous delivery pipelines. While each adds flexibility, it also introduces new, often invisible failures. Development speed is no longer the primary bottleneck of innovation. Reliability is ...

Seeing is believing, or in this case, seeing is understanding, according to New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce report. Retailers who want to provide exceptional customer experiences while improving IT operations efficiency are leaning on observability ... Here are five key takeaways from the report ...

Technology leaders across the federal landscape are facing, and will continue to face, an uphill battle when it comes to fortifying their digital environments against hostile and persistent threat actors. On one hand, they are being asked to push digital transformation ... On the other hand, they are facing the fiscal uncertainty of continuing resolutions (CR) and government shutdowns looming near and far. In the face of these challenges, CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs must figure out how to modernize legacy systems and infrastructure while doing more with less and still defending against external and internal threats ...

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...