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:

APPLICATION 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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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:

APPLICATION 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

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...

Gartner: 40% of Organizations Deploying AI Will Use AI Observability to Monitor Model Performance by 2028

40% of organizations deploying AI will implement dedicated AI observability tools by 2028 to monitor model performance, bias and outputs, according to Gartner ...

Almost Half of AI-Generated Code Fails in Production

Until AI-powered engineering tools have live visibility of how code behaves at runtime, they cannot be trusted to autonomously ensure reliable systems, according to the State of AI-Powered Engineering Report 2026 report from Lightrun. The report reveals that a major volume of manual work is required when AI-generated code is deployed: 43% of AI-generated code requires manual debugging in production, even after passing QA or staging tests. Furthermore, an average of three manual redeploy cycles are required to verify a single AI-suggested code fix in production ...

AI Requires Design, Not Edicts

Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...

How Intelligent Orchestration Enables Enterprises to Move from AI POC to AI Production

Across the enterprise technology landscape, a quiet crisis is playing out. Organizations have run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generative AI pilots. Leadership has celebrated the proof of concept (POCs) ... Industry experience points to a sobering reality: only 5-10% of AI POCs that progress to the pilot stage successfully reach scaled production. The remaining 90% fail because the enterprise environment around them was never ready to absorb them, not the AI models ...

Reliability Is the New Bottleneck of Innovation

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 ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce

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 ...

Maximizing Impact Amid Constraints: The Role of Automation and Orchestration in Federal IT Modernization

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 ...

The SRE Report 2026: Reliability Is Being Redefined

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 ...

The Hidden Data Engineering Work Required to Make Enterprise AI Viable

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 ...