30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 3

APMdigest asked the top minds in the industry what they feel is the most important way Application Performance Management (APM) tools must evolve. The recommendations on this list provide a rare look into the long-term future of APM technology. Part 3 covers the expanding scope of APM tools.

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 1

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 2

11. VISIBILITY ACROSS THE APPLICATION DELIVERY CHAIN

APM must evolve from being a tactical solution for a single pain point into a strategic enterprise-wide category that spans the entire application delivery chain to provide end-to-end monitoring and management analytics that ensure user experience. Next to database, no software is more strategic to the organization than an APM solution with these advanced capabilities. To increase their strategic value to customers, APM vendors should provide tight integration of monitoring data to facilitate analytics and break down silos.
Gabe Lowy
Technology Analyst and Founder of TechTonics Advisors

APM must evolve from being a point function based application, server, or network infrastructure tool to one that looks at the end-to-end application delivery performance characteristics. This means client rendering, network, datacenter infrastructure, application, and security must all be holistically and heuristically incorporated to deliver meaningful and actionable analytics.
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware

Tomorrow's APM will, by necessity be less introspective. A switch from focusing on application health, to user experience, from instrumentation, to analysis, and finally a grudging acknowledgment from the APM vendors that the application itself is only one part of the delivery ecosystem.
Richard Whitehead
Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft

12. VISIBILITY ACROSS ALL APPLICATIONS

As users switch between smartphones, tablets, and PCs in today's converged IT environments, the requirements for End User Experience Monitoring are greatly expanded. APM tools must evolve from use cases addressing monitoring and troubleshooting specific apps to also include service level management, change management, and business analytics for every app used by the workforce on any of the devices on which they rely throughout their day.
Mike Marks
Chief Product Evangelist, Aternity

Customers want response time and throughput instrumentation for all of their applications. All means the ones that they purchased as well as they ones that they built. But the APM vendors do not offer solutions that address the entire application estate at a price that enterprises are willing to pay. APM must evolve to address a broader set of applications at prices that enterprises are willing to pay. However, once APM evolves to meet the above challenge, the question of how to integrate these streams of APM data with infrastructure data in a useful manner must be addressed.
Bernd Harzog
CEO, OpsDataStore

In some senses APM has moved forward and in some it has moved backwards. Recent focus has been on ease of use and immediate implementation. However, this led to major compromises in terms of the level of detail and granularity that tools are gathering and the complete visibility they can bring. There are still black holes that APM is not addressing, and in any medium-large enterprises, most applications are still not monitored at the level that APM can provide. The future must address both requirements related to ease of use and visibility into all types of applications, new or old.
Lanir Shacham
Founder & CEO, Correlsense

13. INFRASTRUCTURE VISIBILITY

APM must evolve to have a more complete view of the application and the infrastructure it runs on. This is especially true as applications and workloads move to the cloud. Having a converged application and infrastructure view that includes the end user perspective is key.
Bill Berutti
President of the Cloud, Data Center and Performance Businesses at BMC Software

APM solutions alone are inadequate in that they are generally infrastructure unaware. While IT operations teams may not control all the siloed assets services run on, they still need to gain granular visibility into the performance of all functional components in order to drive attainment of business outcomes tied to metric-based service levels. Move away from siloed operations and work together with all IT operations teams and you'll improve the mean time to restore services.
Atchison Frazer
CMO, Xangati

APM tools must look beyond the limited view of end-user transaction performance. A customer's service experience consists of simultaneous interactions with an increasingly complex orchestration of digital resources. These resources have dependencies that live in various form factors and may fall outside the scope of traditional APM. Integrating broader analytics from IT Infrastructure Monitoring can complete the service picture.
Antonio Piraino
CTO, ScienceLogic

The APM solutions ecosystem must evolve to become more open, enabling easier integration with point products to ensure proper coverage for multi-platform applications. This is important because complex mobile/web applications are increasingly dependent on back-end mainframe databases. For example, there are tools enabling drill-down analysis for mainframe environments, identifying how code-level problems impact application performance. But this analysis is more helpful if provided in the context of a specific transaction, especially for transactional applications where bottlenecks can impact the end-user experience. This is just one example of the benefits that can occur when APM solutions interconnect across platforms.
Spencer Hallman
Product Manager, Compuware

14. VISIBILITY ACROSS HYBRID IT ENVIRONMENT

One of the biggest changes happening in IT environments today is the adoption and migration to cloud services. However, not every IT service is being migrated. In fact, a recent SolarWinds survey found that while almost all organizations have migrated at least some applications and other infrastructure to the cloud, the majority of IT pros also say their departments will never transition everything off-premises. As such, APM tools must evolve to surface a single point of truth for application performance across both on-premises and the cloud. The normalization of metrics, alerts and events collected from applications, regardless of their service provider, is quickly becoming an absolute necessity for IT departments tasked with ensuring Quality-of-Service objectives while optimizing their approach to remediation, troubleshooting and optimization."
Kong Yang
Head Geek, SolarWinds

15. SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

The relationship between application and infrastructure is critical. We believe both must be monitored, that there is now either/or. As both infrastructure and applications have changed through virtualization and cloud, so has the way we need to be able to monitor both, individually and collectively. The most important way to move application monitoring forward is to give administrators the tools they need to monitor physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, as well as applications. In an ideal world, administrators are able to do this through one tool, gaining insight into both application and infrastructure performance through a single pane of glass.
Dirk Paessler
CEO, Paessler AG

From our vantage point, the X factor in application performance management is the normalization of hybrid IT. Four fifths of enterprises have implemented hybrid IT and are not looking back. But two thirds say they are in the dark when it comes to single pane of glass performance monitoring and diagnostics of the entire infrastructure spread over on-prem physical, private-cloud and public-cloud domains. If you don't have that, say goodbye to real-time management and troubleshooting.
Steve Brown
Director of Enterprise Solutions, Viavi

In the software-defined era, organizations have a laundry list of application providers to choose from. This multi-sourced model allows decision makers to select best-of-breed tools for each integration. This model also leads to fragmentation, which makes solving problems more complex and time consuming, not to mention demoralizing for people across teams. APM tools won't be able to provide a bird's-eye view of an organization's integration environment, but they must integrate with other tools that can provide the governance and standards needed for IT operations teams to have one source of truth when things are breaking.
Tim Armandpour
VP of Engineering, PagerDuty

Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 4, covering the end user experience.

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30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 3

APMdigest asked the top minds in the industry what they feel is the most important way Application Performance Management (APM) tools must evolve. The recommendations on this list provide a rare look into the long-term future of APM technology. Part 3 covers the expanding scope of APM tools.

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 1

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 2

11. VISIBILITY ACROSS THE APPLICATION DELIVERY CHAIN

APM must evolve from being a tactical solution for a single pain point into a strategic enterprise-wide category that spans the entire application delivery chain to provide end-to-end monitoring and management analytics that ensure user experience. Next to database, no software is more strategic to the organization than an APM solution with these advanced capabilities. To increase their strategic value to customers, APM vendors should provide tight integration of monitoring data to facilitate analytics and break down silos.
Gabe Lowy
Technology Analyst and Founder of TechTonics Advisors

APM must evolve from being a point function based application, server, or network infrastructure tool to one that looks at the end-to-end application delivery performance characteristics. This means client rendering, network, datacenter infrastructure, application, and security must all be holistically and heuristically incorporated to deliver meaningful and actionable analytics.
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware

Tomorrow's APM will, by necessity be less introspective. A switch from focusing on application health, to user experience, from instrumentation, to analysis, and finally a grudging acknowledgment from the APM vendors that the application itself is only one part of the delivery ecosystem.
Richard Whitehead
Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft

12. VISIBILITY ACROSS ALL APPLICATIONS

As users switch between smartphones, tablets, and PCs in today's converged IT environments, the requirements for End User Experience Monitoring are greatly expanded. APM tools must evolve from use cases addressing monitoring and troubleshooting specific apps to also include service level management, change management, and business analytics for every app used by the workforce on any of the devices on which they rely throughout their day.
Mike Marks
Chief Product Evangelist, Aternity

Customers want response time and throughput instrumentation for all of their applications. All means the ones that they purchased as well as they ones that they built. But the APM vendors do not offer solutions that address the entire application estate at a price that enterprises are willing to pay. APM must evolve to address a broader set of applications at prices that enterprises are willing to pay. However, once APM evolves to meet the above challenge, the question of how to integrate these streams of APM data with infrastructure data in a useful manner must be addressed.
Bernd Harzog
CEO, OpsDataStore

In some senses APM has moved forward and in some it has moved backwards. Recent focus has been on ease of use and immediate implementation. However, this led to major compromises in terms of the level of detail and granularity that tools are gathering and the complete visibility they can bring. There are still black holes that APM is not addressing, and in any medium-large enterprises, most applications are still not monitored at the level that APM can provide. The future must address both requirements related to ease of use and visibility into all types of applications, new or old.
Lanir Shacham
Founder & CEO, Correlsense

13. INFRASTRUCTURE VISIBILITY

APM must evolve to have a more complete view of the application and the infrastructure it runs on. This is especially true as applications and workloads move to the cloud. Having a converged application and infrastructure view that includes the end user perspective is key.
Bill Berutti
President of the Cloud, Data Center and Performance Businesses at BMC Software

APM solutions alone are inadequate in that they are generally infrastructure unaware. While IT operations teams may not control all the siloed assets services run on, they still need to gain granular visibility into the performance of all functional components in order to drive attainment of business outcomes tied to metric-based service levels. Move away from siloed operations and work together with all IT operations teams and you'll improve the mean time to restore services.
Atchison Frazer
CMO, Xangati

APM tools must look beyond the limited view of end-user transaction performance. A customer's service experience consists of simultaneous interactions with an increasingly complex orchestration of digital resources. These resources have dependencies that live in various form factors and may fall outside the scope of traditional APM. Integrating broader analytics from IT Infrastructure Monitoring can complete the service picture.
Antonio Piraino
CTO, ScienceLogic

The APM solutions ecosystem must evolve to become more open, enabling easier integration with point products to ensure proper coverage for multi-platform applications. This is important because complex mobile/web applications are increasingly dependent on back-end mainframe databases. For example, there are tools enabling drill-down analysis for mainframe environments, identifying how code-level problems impact application performance. But this analysis is more helpful if provided in the context of a specific transaction, especially for transactional applications where bottlenecks can impact the end-user experience. This is just one example of the benefits that can occur when APM solutions interconnect across platforms.
Spencer Hallman
Product Manager, Compuware

14. VISIBILITY ACROSS HYBRID IT ENVIRONMENT

One of the biggest changes happening in IT environments today is the adoption and migration to cloud services. However, not every IT service is being migrated. In fact, a recent SolarWinds survey found that while almost all organizations have migrated at least some applications and other infrastructure to the cloud, the majority of IT pros also say their departments will never transition everything off-premises. As such, APM tools must evolve to surface a single point of truth for application performance across both on-premises and the cloud. The normalization of metrics, alerts and events collected from applications, regardless of their service provider, is quickly becoming an absolute necessity for IT departments tasked with ensuring Quality-of-Service objectives while optimizing their approach to remediation, troubleshooting and optimization."
Kong Yang
Head Geek, SolarWinds

15. SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

The relationship between application and infrastructure is critical. We believe both must be monitored, that there is now either/or. As both infrastructure and applications have changed through virtualization and cloud, so has the way we need to be able to monitor both, individually and collectively. The most important way to move application monitoring forward is to give administrators the tools they need to monitor physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, as well as applications. In an ideal world, administrators are able to do this through one tool, gaining insight into both application and infrastructure performance through a single pane of glass.
Dirk Paessler
CEO, Paessler AG

From our vantage point, the X factor in application performance management is the normalization of hybrid IT. Four fifths of enterprises have implemented hybrid IT and are not looking back. But two thirds say they are in the dark when it comes to single pane of glass performance monitoring and diagnostics of the entire infrastructure spread over on-prem physical, private-cloud and public-cloud domains. If you don't have that, say goodbye to real-time management and troubleshooting.
Steve Brown
Director of Enterprise Solutions, Viavi

In the software-defined era, organizations have a laundry list of application providers to choose from. This multi-sourced model allows decision makers to select best-of-breed tools for each integration. This model also leads to fragmentation, which makes solving problems more complex and time consuming, not to mention demoralizing for people across teams. APM tools won't be able to provide a bird's-eye view of an organization's integration environment, but they must integrate with other tools that can provide the governance and standards needed for IT operations teams to have one source of truth when things are breaking.
Tim Armandpour
VP of Engineering, PagerDuty

Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 4, covering the end user experience.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

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 ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

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 ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

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 ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

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 ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

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 ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

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 ...

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