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30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 1

At the end of every year, APMdigest takes a look into the future by asking experts to predict the changes that will occur within the Application Performance Management (APM) industry in the coming new year. With this new list, we are looking even farther into the future, to the evolution of APM.

This list is not so much about predictions – rather it is comprised of expert opinions on how APM should evolve. It is more like an evolutionary wish list for APM.

In preparing this list, APMdigest asked the top minds in the industry what they feel is the most important way APM tools must evolve. The recommendations on this list provide a rare look into the long-term future of APM technology.

The 2016 APM Predictions List was the longest predictions list ever featured on APMdigest – reflecting a rapidly growing, changing and increasingly complex IT environment that presents more challenges than ever before – and this list is equally epic, with 30 categories of recommendations to be posted over the next 6 days.

As usual for APMdigest lists like this, some of the recommendations could fit into multiple categories. We had to create general category headings to give the list structure, but the real value to be gained from the list is the thoughtful and introspective visions of the future offered by each expert.

1. DISCOVERING AND MONITORING DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS

The biggest threat to existing APM technology is the increasing dynamism of the environment. While we've had virtual infrastructures for well over a decade, the rate of change still seemed manageable. With the advent of containers and microservices plus the adoption of DevOps CI/CD practices, however, there is the potential for an entirely new scale of environmental flux if the behavior observed within large cloud companies gives us any early insights. We need to rethink not only how to discover these increasingly ephemeral assets, but also to effectively monitor them – without overloading the infrastructure (or breaking the enterprise budget).
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

Web-scale applications have created a massively complex challenge for modern software operations. Complexity emerging from cloud architectures, containerized microservices, open source frameworks, and data-centric applications makes it a challenge for any engineering team to monitor their systems. APM needs to evolve from simple metric collection and plotting graphs to intelligent monitoring that automatically discovers all the dynamic components of web-scale apps (open source frameworks included), provides a visual topology, and leverages data-science for intelligent analysis and anomaly detection.
Alan Ngai
CTO, OpsClarity

2. CONVERGENCE OF MONITORING

APM consists of three main factions which must all evolve and come together for a complete solution. They are Wire Data Analytics, Synthetic Transactions, and Agent Code Instrumentation. To gain visibility at the edge and report on the End User Experience you must develop a strategy on the best way to bring together the 3 monitoring factions.
Larry Dragich
Director of Customer Experience Management at the Auto Club Group and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

3. ACTIONABLE INSIGHT

APM must evolve from being descriptive to prescriptive. Let's face it, there is an overwhelming amount of data collected by APM solutions today. But adding more data to the haystack doesn't make it easier to find a needle. What's needed is the analytics to sift through the data and provide actionable insights with prescriptive solutions. This way, you not only understand the impacts of a performance or user experience issue, but are provided guidance to understand when, where and how to act to solve or even prevent it.
Aruna Ravichandran
VP, DevOps Product and Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies

Technology is disrupting all industries and it is happening at a breakneck speed. New business models and customer experience are supported by a mix of "technology pillars" like cloud and mobile, as well as accelerators like IoT and Artificial Intelligence. The network is what ties everything together and carries the data. As such, IT teams must manage growing service delivery complexity, design for large-scale traffic with visibility everywhere today as well as support for zetabytes of data in the future, and build for speed and agility to enable informed real-time decisions in both agile and highly automated environments. To meet these business assurance challenges, APM solutions must provide actionable insights into the connections between people, machines, data, and processes so as to optimize agility, assure service delivery, mitigate risk and provide a feedback loop to operations, development, and business functions. If done right, there are huge business benefits: happy customers and revenue growth.
Ron Lifton
Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager, NetScout

4. INSIGHT ACROSS ON-PREMISE AND CLOUD

IT environments are becoming extremely complicated with an increasing number using some combination of on-prem and cloud resources. As enterprise cloud adoption rises, hybrid cloud applications are expanding. For example, UI applications could be running on dynamic, engaging public clouds that interface with tested on-premises business logic and databases. An Application Performance Management tool that can provide analytical insights across ALL application dependencies and give one integrated view is critical in ensuring enterprise IT and application DevOps teams operate at the same sustained fast pace.
Arun Biligiri
APM Offering Management Leader, IBM

5. IT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Application Performance Monitoring solutions must evolve as businesses traverse their own journeys with digital transformation. In a socially and mobile enabled world, the consumer has taken control and every experience and every interaction matters. These interactions will be more and more with Internet of Things (IoT) devices leading to many new classes of things to monitor and will require tracking of highly complex interactions as well as collection and analysis of massive amounts of data. APM solutions must evolve from stand-alone solutions to a complete IT Operations Management suite and integrate with these Big Data challenges to avoid evolutionary dead end.
Daniel Schrijver
Senior Principal Product Marketing Director, Oracle

Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 2, covering the evolution of the relationship between APM and analytics.

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

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30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 1

At the end of every year, APMdigest takes a look into the future by asking experts to predict the changes that will occur within the Application Performance Management (APM) industry in the coming new year. With this new list, we are looking even farther into the future, to the evolution of APM.

This list is not so much about predictions – rather it is comprised of expert opinions on how APM should evolve. It is more like an evolutionary wish list for APM.

In preparing this list, APMdigest asked the top minds in the industry what they feel is the most important way APM tools must evolve. The recommendations on this list provide a rare look into the long-term future of APM technology.

The 2016 APM Predictions List was the longest predictions list ever featured on APMdigest – reflecting a rapidly growing, changing and increasingly complex IT environment that presents more challenges than ever before – and this list is equally epic, with 30 categories of recommendations to be posted over the next 6 days.

As usual for APMdigest lists like this, some of the recommendations could fit into multiple categories. We had to create general category headings to give the list structure, but the real value to be gained from the list is the thoughtful and introspective visions of the future offered by each expert.

1. DISCOVERING AND MONITORING DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS

The biggest threat to existing APM technology is the increasing dynamism of the environment. While we've had virtual infrastructures for well over a decade, the rate of change still seemed manageable. With the advent of containers and microservices plus the adoption of DevOps CI/CD practices, however, there is the potential for an entirely new scale of environmental flux if the behavior observed within large cloud companies gives us any early insights. We need to rethink not only how to discover these increasingly ephemeral assets, but also to effectively monitor them – without overloading the infrastructure (or breaking the enterprise budget).
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

Web-scale applications have created a massively complex challenge for modern software operations. Complexity emerging from cloud architectures, containerized microservices, open source frameworks, and data-centric applications makes it a challenge for any engineering team to monitor their systems. APM needs to evolve from simple metric collection and plotting graphs to intelligent monitoring that automatically discovers all the dynamic components of web-scale apps (open source frameworks included), provides a visual topology, and leverages data-science for intelligent analysis and anomaly detection.
Alan Ngai
CTO, OpsClarity

2. CONVERGENCE OF MONITORING

APM consists of three main factions which must all evolve and come together for a complete solution. They are Wire Data Analytics, Synthetic Transactions, and Agent Code Instrumentation. To gain visibility at the edge and report on the End User Experience you must develop a strategy on the best way to bring together the 3 monitoring factions.
Larry Dragich
Director of Customer Experience Management at the Auto Club Group and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

3. ACTIONABLE INSIGHT

APM must evolve from being descriptive to prescriptive. Let's face it, there is an overwhelming amount of data collected by APM solutions today. But adding more data to the haystack doesn't make it easier to find a needle. What's needed is the analytics to sift through the data and provide actionable insights with prescriptive solutions. This way, you not only understand the impacts of a performance or user experience issue, but are provided guidance to understand when, where and how to act to solve or even prevent it.
Aruna Ravichandran
VP, DevOps Product and Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies

Technology is disrupting all industries and it is happening at a breakneck speed. New business models and customer experience are supported by a mix of "technology pillars" like cloud and mobile, as well as accelerators like IoT and Artificial Intelligence. The network is what ties everything together and carries the data. As such, IT teams must manage growing service delivery complexity, design for large-scale traffic with visibility everywhere today as well as support for zetabytes of data in the future, and build for speed and agility to enable informed real-time decisions in both agile and highly automated environments. To meet these business assurance challenges, APM solutions must provide actionable insights into the connections between people, machines, data, and processes so as to optimize agility, assure service delivery, mitigate risk and provide a feedback loop to operations, development, and business functions. If done right, there are huge business benefits: happy customers and revenue growth.
Ron Lifton
Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager, NetScout

4. INSIGHT ACROSS ON-PREMISE AND CLOUD

IT environments are becoming extremely complicated with an increasing number using some combination of on-prem and cloud resources. As enterprise cloud adoption rises, hybrid cloud applications are expanding. For example, UI applications could be running on dynamic, engaging public clouds that interface with tested on-premises business logic and databases. An Application Performance Management tool that can provide analytical insights across ALL application dependencies and give one integrated view is critical in ensuring enterprise IT and application DevOps teams operate at the same sustained fast pace.
Arun Biligiri
APM Offering Management Leader, IBM

5. IT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Application Performance Monitoring solutions must evolve as businesses traverse their own journeys with digital transformation. In a socially and mobile enabled world, the consumer has taken control and every experience and every interaction matters. These interactions will be more and more with Internet of Things (IoT) devices leading to many new classes of things to monitor and will require tracking of highly complex interactions as well as collection and analysis of massive amounts of data. APM solutions must evolve from stand-alone solutions to a complete IT Operations Management suite and integrate with these Big Data challenges to avoid evolutionary dead end.
Daniel Schrijver
Senior Principal Product Marketing Director, Oracle

Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 2, covering the evolution of the relationship between APM and analytics.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...