APM and Observability: Cutting Through the Confusion — Part 7

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

APM and Observability are often utilized by different teams within an organization, though there is considerable overlap, according to Arun Balachandran, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions.

Start with: APM and Observability - Cutting Through the Confusion - Part 6

In Part 7, the experts examine the different roles in IT and how they use either APM and Observability, or both:

APPLICATIONS OWNERS: DEV AND ITOPS

APM tools, with their guided interfaces and focus on specific application metrics, are often used directly by application developers, operations teams, and sometimes even product managers to understand application health and user experience.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Software Engineer, OllyGarden

APM is owned primarily by the application owners and developers, who typically have some latitude over how to monitor their specific applications.
Paul Appleby
CEO, Virtana

APM tools are usually used by teams responsible for developing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. This typically entails software developers, SREs, and QA and performance testing teams.
Douglas James
VP, Solutions & Ecosystem, ScienceLogic

DEVELOPERS

APM tends to be the go-to for developers, application support, and QA professionals focused on application performance and behavior. 
Arun Balachandran
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions

APM is a more focused tool for application developers, and while application developers also use observability, other roles also make use of observability. 
Chrystal Taylor
Tech Evangelist, SolarWinds

APM offers granular insights at the code level, such as transaction tracing and end-user monitoring, which are indispensable for developers tackling application-specific challenges. These capabilities are foundational for diagnosing and resolving issues within the application layer.
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

The Tech Radar 2025 notes how developers experimenting with observability feel more empowered because it gives them the insight and autonomy to debug and optimize systems independently, not just escalate tickets.
Brian Douglas
Head of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

DEVOPS

Observability is more commonly in the hands of site reliability engineers, DevOps, and platform teams who oversee the overall health and stability of complex, distributed systems. As DevOps practices continue to mature and responsibilities shift further left, these roles are increasingly converging. Today, it's common for engineers across these functions to leverage both APM and observability tools to ensure seamless deployment and smooth operations.
Arun Balachandran
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions

Historically, APM and observability have been used in different roles. APM was used more by operations/monitoring teams, while observability was used more by developers/DevOps. However, this division is eroding as DevOps practices take hold and operational complexity increases. The shift from segregated to unified operational responsibility mirrors the broader IT evolution.
Jeff Cobb
Global Head of Product & Design, Chronosphere

SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEERS AND PLATFORM ENGINEERS

Observability practices, requiring deeper interaction with raw data, query languages, and system-wide context, tend to be the domain of more specialized roles like Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) or dedicated observability platform teams who need to perform deeper, more exploratory investigations.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Software Engineer, OllyGarden

SREs and platform engineers harness observability for cross-system visibility. Observability's holistic view is a game-changer for managing modern, distributed systems ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
Varma Kunaparaju
SVP and GM for Cloud Platform and OpsRamp Software, HPE

Observability tools are designed to support SRE-based management objectives focused on error budgets as opposed to generating unneeded alerts. As an example, if a cluster is nearing capacity, should an alert be generated? For traditional IT Ops, this would be a typical alert. However, for SREs and developers already struggling with alert fatigue, there should not be an alert created as the Kubernetes pod should auto scale. The SRE and developer focus should be on what is occurring if this autoscaling is failing when the application error budget is consumed.
Harald Burose
Director, Product Management, Research & Development – Engineering, OpenText

ITOPS

APM is typically used by the business and infrastructure monitoring teams. However, the utilization of more user-friendly observability tools with OpenTelemetry allows the ITOps teams to use the same data with the correlated logs and metrics aligned to traces to triage issues and route appropriately (is it a code issue or a 3rd party latency?) and still allows developers and SREs to use existing toolsets where they have experience.
Harald Burose
Director, Product Management, Research & Development – Engineering, OpenText

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL

The roles in these spaces are fluid to begin with. I have yet to see two SREs in two different organizations with the same job description. Different organizations will have different operational models due to different team structures, team resourcing, tech stacks, etc.
Sven Delmas
VP of Research, Mezmo

Developers have gravitated towards APM, while operations and site reliability engineers (SREs) have focused on observability. However, as collaboration becomes more critical and systems grow increasingly interconnected, these roles are converging. Teams now require tools that foster a shared understanding and provide insights that transcend individual roles, enhancing collective efficacy. Observability's integration with GenAI further supports this convergence by providing a shared language and insights across roles.
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

A lot depends on your team's maturity, scale, personnel and organization. You might have a very large and clearly-delineated team, whereby the microservices team running a D-APM tool, is somewhat removed or walled-off from the database team that's running a database observability tool. Or the mobile client applications team might be far removed from the networking observability team. But in smaller organizations you might need to be a "jack-of-all-trades." Or at a larger organization you might be at that senior role and when those escalations occur, you need to be familiar with drilling down into any system across your organization, using whatever APM or observability tools your team has to troubleshoot, diagnose and resolve the most complex, urgent, bottom-line-impacting and pernicious of problems.
Peter Corless
Director, Product Marketing, StarTree

Platforms that unify telemetry data enable any team member to investigate issues without requiring specialized expertise in multiple tools.
Rakesh Gupta
Head of Product Management, Observe

Go to: APM and Observability: Cutting Through the Confusion — Part 8, exploring whether you need APM, Observability or both.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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The rise of hybrid cloud environments, the explosion of IoT devices, the proliferation of remote work, and advanced cyber threats have created a monitoring challenge that traditional approaches simply cannot meet. IT teams find themselves drowning in a sea of data, struggling to identify critical threats amidst a deluge of alerts, and often reacting to incidents long after they've begun. This is where AI and ML are leveraged ...

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Getting applications into the hands of those who need them quickly and securely has long been the goal of a branch of IT often referred to as End User Computing (EUC). Over recent years, the way applications (and data) have been delivered to these "users" has changed noticeably. Organizations have many more choices available to them now, and there will be more to come ... But how did we get here? Where are we going? Is this all too complicated? ...

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APM and Observability: Cutting Through the Confusion — Part 7

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

APM and Observability are often utilized by different teams within an organization, though there is considerable overlap, according to Arun Balachandran, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions.

Start with: APM and Observability - Cutting Through the Confusion - Part 6

In Part 7, the experts examine the different roles in IT and how they use either APM and Observability, or both:

APPLICATIONS OWNERS: DEV AND ITOPS

APM tools, with their guided interfaces and focus on specific application metrics, are often used directly by application developers, operations teams, and sometimes even product managers to understand application health and user experience.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Software Engineer, OllyGarden

APM is owned primarily by the application owners and developers, who typically have some latitude over how to monitor their specific applications.
Paul Appleby
CEO, Virtana

APM tools are usually used by teams responsible for developing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. This typically entails software developers, SREs, and QA and performance testing teams.
Douglas James
VP, Solutions & Ecosystem, ScienceLogic

DEVELOPERS

APM tends to be the go-to for developers, application support, and QA professionals focused on application performance and behavior. 
Arun Balachandran
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions

APM is a more focused tool for application developers, and while application developers also use observability, other roles also make use of observability. 
Chrystal Taylor
Tech Evangelist, SolarWinds

APM offers granular insights at the code level, such as transaction tracing and end-user monitoring, which are indispensable for developers tackling application-specific challenges. These capabilities are foundational for diagnosing and resolving issues within the application layer.
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

The Tech Radar 2025 notes how developers experimenting with observability feel more empowered because it gives them the insight and autonomy to debug and optimize systems independently, not just escalate tickets.
Brian Douglas
Head of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

DEVOPS

Observability is more commonly in the hands of site reliability engineers, DevOps, and platform teams who oversee the overall health and stability of complex, distributed systems. As DevOps practices continue to mature and responsibilities shift further left, these roles are increasingly converging. Today, it's common for engineers across these functions to leverage both APM and observability tools to ensure seamless deployment and smooth operations.
Arun Balachandran
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine APM Solutions

Historically, APM and observability have been used in different roles. APM was used more by operations/monitoring teams, while observability was used more by developers/DevOps. However, this division is eroding as DevOps practices take hold and operational complexity increases. The shift from segregated to unified operational responsibility mirrors the broader IT evolution.
Jeff Cobb
Global Head of Product & Design, Chronosphere

SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEERS AND PLATFORM ENGINEERS

Observability practices, requiring deeper interaction with raw data, query languages, and system-wide context, tend to be the domain of more specialized roles like Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) or dedicated observability platform teams who need to perform deeper, more exploratory investigations.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Software Engineer, OllyGarden

SREs and platform engineers harness observability for cross-system visibility. Observability's holistic view is a game-changer for managing modern, distributed systems ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
Varma Kunaparaju
SVP and GM for Cloud Platform and OpsRamp Software, HPE

Observability tools are designed to support SRE-based management objectives focused on error budgets as opposed to generating unneeded alerts. As an example, if a cluster is nearing capacity, should an alert be generated? For traditional IT Ops, this would be a typical alert. However, for SREs and developers already struggling with alert fatigue, there should not be an alert created as the Kubernetes pod should auto scale. The SRE and developer focus should be on what is occurring if this autoscaling is failing when the application error budget is consumed.
Harald Burose
Director, Product Management, Research & Development – Engineering, OpenText

ITOPS

APM is typically used by the business and infrastructure monitoring teams. However, the utilization of more user-friendly observability tools with OpenTelemetry allows the ITOps teams to use the same data with the correlated logs and metrics aligned to traces to triage issues and route appropriately (is it a code issue or a 3rd party latency?) and still allows developers and SREs to use existing toolsets where they have experience.
Harald Burose
Director, Product Management, Research & Development – Engineering, OpenText

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL

The roles in these spaces are fluid to begin with. I have yet to see two SREs in two different organizations with the same job description. Different organizations will have different operational models due to different team structures, team resourcing, tech stacks, etc.
Sven Delmas
VP of Research, Mezmo

Developers have gravitated towards APM, while operations and site reliability engineers (SREs) have focused on observability. However, as collaboration becomes more critical and systems grow increasingly interconnected, these roles are converging. Teams now require tools that foster a shared understanding and provide insights that transcend individual roles, enhancing collective efficacy. Observability's integration with GenAI further supports this convergence by providing a shared language and insights across roles.
Gab Menachem
VP ITOM, ServiceNow

A lot depends on your team's maturity, scale, personnel and organization. You might have a very large and clearly-delineated team, whereby the microservices team running a D-APM tool, is somewhat removed or walled-off from the database team that's running a database observability tool. Or the mobile client applications team might be far removed from the networking observability team. But in smaller organizations you might need to be a "jack-of-all-trades." Or at a larger organization you might be at that senior role and when those escalations occur, you need to be familiar with drilling down into any system across your organization, using whatever APM or observability tools your team has to troubleshoot, diagnose and resolve the most complex, urgent, bottom-line-impacting and pernicious of problems.
Peter Corless
Director, Product Marketing, StarTree

Platforms that unify telemetry data enable any team member to investigate issues without requiring specialized expertise in multiple tools.
Rakesh Gupta
Head of Product Management, Observe

Go to: APM and Observability: Cutting Through the Confusion — Part 8, exploring whether you need APM, Observability or both.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Agentic Remediation: Capitalizing on the New Era of Database Observability

Developers building AI applications are not just looking for fault patterns after deployment; they must detect issues quickly during development and have the ability to prevent issues after going live. Unfortunately, traditional observability tools can no longer meet the needs of AI-driven enterprise application development. AI-powered detection and auto-remediation tools designed to keep pace with rapid development are now emerging to proactively manage performance and prevent downtime ...

ZTNA 101: Common Misconceptions That Keep Companies From Adopting It

Every few years, the cybersecurity industry adopts a new buzzword. "Zero Trust" has endured longer than most — and for good reason. Its promise is simple: trust nothing by default, verify everything continuously. Yet many organizations still hesitate to implement Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). The problem isn't that ZTNA doesn't work. It's that it's often misunderstood ...

When Dashboards Say "Green" But Customers See Red: Why Digital Experience Still Fails at the Last Mile

For many retail brands, peak season is the annual stress test of their digital infrastructure. It's also when often technical dashboards glow green, yet customer feedback, digital experience frustration, and conversion trends tell a different story entirely. Over the past several years, we've seen the same pattern across retail, financial services, travel, and media: internal application performance metrics fail to capture the true experience of users connecting over local broadband, mobile carriers, and congested networks using multiple devices across geographies ...

Don't Fall Into These 5 PostgreSQL Traps

PostgreSQL promises greater flexibility, performance, and cost savings compared to proprietary alternatives. But successfully deploying it isn't always straightforward, and there are some hidden traps along the way that even seasoned IT leaders can stumble into. In this blog, I'll highlight five of the most common pitfalls with PostgreSQL deployment and offer guidance on how to avoid them, along with the best path forward ...

Why AI Is No Longer Optional for IT Operations

The rise of hybrid cloud environments, the explosion of IoT devices, the proliferation of remote work, and advanced cyber threats have created a monitoring challenge that traditional approaches simply cannot meet. IT teams find themselves drowning in a sea of data, struggling to identify critical threats amidst a deluge of alerts, and often reacting to incidents long after they've begun. This is where AI and ML are leveraged ...

Outages Aren't the Enemy, Complacency Is

Three practices, chaos testing, incident retrospectives, and AIOps-driven monitoring, are transforming platform teams from reactive responders into proactive builders of resilient, self-healing systems. The evolution is not just technical; it's cultural. The modern platform engineer isn't just maintaining infrastructure. They're product owners designing for reliability, observability, and continuous improvement ...

The Changing World of Application Delivery (and why it pays to have choices)

Getting applications into the hands of those who need them quickly and securely has long been the goal of a branch of IT often referred to as End User Computing (EUC). Over recent years, the way applications (and data) have been delivered to these "users" has changed noticeably. Organizations have many more choices available to them now, and there will be more to come ... But how did we get here? Where are we going? Is this all too complicated? ...

When a Metadata Change Broke the Internet: What the Cloudflare Outage Really Revealed

On November 18, a single database permission change inside Cloudflare set off a chain of failures that rippled across the Internet. Traffic stalled. Authentication broke. Workers KV returned waves of 5xx errors as systems fell in and out of sync. For nearly three hours, one of the most resilient networks on the planet struggled under the weight of a change no one expected to matter ... Cloudflare recovered quickly, but the deeper lesson reaches far beyond this incident ...

Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast: Cloudflare Outage

Chris Steffen and Ken Buckler from EMA discuss the Cloudflare outage and what availability means in the technology space ...

When Milliseconds Matter: What Every Industry Can Learn From the Self-Driving Playbook

Every modern industry is confronting the same challenge: human reaction time is no longer fast enough for real-time decision environments. Across sectors, from financial services to manufacturing to cybersecurity and beyond, the stakes mirror those of autonomous vehicles — systems operating in complex, high-risk environments where milliseconds matter ...