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30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 4

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 4 covers the end user experience.

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 1

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 2

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 3

16. END USER EXPERIENCE

In this era of digital transformation, delivering an exceptional end user experience is one of the most important goals for enterprises. APM must evolve into a unified monitoring solution that shows a clear linkage to the quality of the end user experience. Additionally, monitoring of the supporting infrastructure is another critical component in delivering the best overall experience to the end-users of the application.
Peter Kacandes
Senior Product Marketing Manager, AppDynamics

Because user experience is the new service level agreement standard, businesses must arm themselves with APM tools that natively provide end-to-end visibility into user experience across mobile, web and e-commerce platforms, monitoring and analyzing API calls, runtime environments, and business transactions in the context of user actions and their devices.
Monica Benjamin
Director of Product Marketing, HPE Software

Read Monica Benjamin's blog: APM Evolution - End User Experience

According to a recent Gartner survey, 46 percent of enterprises view end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) as the most important APM dimension, and 49 percent cite "enhance customer service quality" as their first choice for rationalizing APM purchases. Companies know the end-user experience impacts the bottom line, but they have trouble quantifying exactly how much. APM must evolve to enable not only better understanding of the end-user experience, but also the direct business impact of poor performance. This will drive future APM investments.
Dennis Callaghan
Director of Industry Innovation, Catchpoint

APM tools need to get as close as possible to the end users. That could mean putting them into mobile apps and browsers, running playback-bots, or implementing in-app customer feedback mechanisms. That's the most important way APM tools must evolve. Traditionally, APM tools have focused largely on monitoring internal, full app stacks inside the data center. Now, we're seeing more consolidation in the application development and deployment stack – for instance, AWS for hosting and NoSQL as the preferred database technology. That means APM tools will gradually shift from lower-level challenges (monitoring apps, servers, and databases) to higher-level ones. These new challenges would include things like a) understanding user behavior and tying it back to the application developers' world via time-based hooks and b) knowing that a new workflow is turning more Android users away than the previous flow. That kind of insight is what today's app developers should expect from an APM tool.
Dev Anand Ramasamy
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

17. END-USER EXPERIENCE + ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

The APM tools today measure and expose the latency and availability of digital services. In order to offer the owners of these services a better overview and control of user experience, the APMs will need to add two additional dimensions to their dashboards – tracing of users and root cauuses. The APMs of tomorrow will have to monitor the experience of individual users and when the experience is not satisfying, expose root causes with the precision of a specific line in source code.
Ivo Mägi
Co-founder and Head of Product, Plumbr

18. DIGITAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Application Performance Management tools must evolve to become Digital Performance Management. As the definition of "application" is both expanding and becoming more vague, it's important for these tools to focus on the customer experience end-to-end. That's essentially what we mean by digital performance.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

APM has historically been IT-centric, driven by operations and development, mainly to more efficiently identify and fix issues. However, this gives little or no thought to the digital customer experience. The most successful businesses are practicing what we call Digital Performance Management (DPM), using customer experience insights as a common language to foster collaboration and align priorities across these teams including business stakeholders. DPM collected analytics are uniquely positioned to help break silos by providing detailed insight around user behavior, delivered experience quality and the supporting applications and infrastructure health and performance across channels.
Erwan Paccard
Director of Customer Experience Marketing, Dynatrace

2016 will see the beginning of a mass transition from APM to DPM (Digital Performance Management) with emphasis on front-end performance measurement, testing and optimization based on analytics insights gained from the holy trinity of data - real user, business outcome and ops metrics.
Ann Ruckstuhl
CMO, SOASTA

19. APPLICATION-AWARE APM

The biggest evolution in application performance management will be application-aware solutions in the virtualized environment that tie the end user to the virtualized infrastructure that is delivering the application. As the management interface grows increasingly complex with virtual machines, hybrid cloud and hypervisor-based solutions, an evolution must take place to ensure that IT understands how their business critical applications are using compute, storage, network and virtualization resources on a user-by-user basis. As IT continues to evolve, monitoring solutions must also evolve to provide complete transparency throughout applications and all infrastructure layers.
Simon Taylor
President, Comtrade Software

Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 5, covering the impact of APM on the Business.

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 4

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 4 covers the end user experience.

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 1

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 2

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 3

16. END USER EXPERIENCE

In this era of digital transformation, delivering an exceptional end user experience is one of the most important goals for enterprises. APM must evolve into a unified monitoring solution that shows a clear linkage to the quality of the end user experience. Additionally, monitoring of the supporting infrastructure is another critical component in delivering the best overall experience to the end-users of the application.
Peter Kacandes
Senior Product Marketing Manager, AppDynamics

Because user experience is the new service level agreement standard, businesses must arm themselves with APM tools that natively provide end-to-end visibility into user experience across mobile, web and e-commerce platforms, monitoring and analyzing API calls, runtime environments, and business transactions in the context of user actions and their devices.
Monica Benjamin
Director of Product Marketing, HPE Software

Read Monica Benjamin's blog: APM Evolution - End User Experience

According to a recent Gartner survey, 46 percent of enterprises view end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) as the most important APM dimension, and 49 percent cite "enhance customer service quality" as their first choice for rationalizing APM purchases. Companies know the end-user experience impacts the bottom line, but they have trouble quantifying exactly how much. APM must evolve to enable not only better understanding of the end-user experience, but also the direct business impact of poor performance. This will drive future APM investments.
Dennis Callaghan
Director of Industry Innovation, Catchpoint

APM tools need to get as close as possible to the end users. That could mean putting them into mobile apps and browsers, running playback-bots, or implementing in-app customer feedback mechanisms. That's the most important way APM tools must evolve. Traditionally, APM tools have focused largely on monitoring internal, full app stacks inside the data center. Now, we're seeing more consolidation in the application development and deployment stack – for instance, AWS for hosting and NoSQL as the preferred database technology. That means APM tools will gradually shift from lower-level challenges (monitoring apps, servers, and databases) to higher-level ones. These new challenges would include things like a) understanding user behavior and tying it back to the application developers' world via time-based hooks and b) knowing that a new workflow is turning more Android users away than the previous flow. That kind of insight is what today's app developers should expect from an APM tool.
Dev Anand Ramasamy
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

17. END-USER EXPERIENCE + ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

The APM tools today measure and expose the latency and availability of digital services. In order to offer the owners of these services a better overview and control of user experience, the APMs will need to add two additional dimensions to their dashboards – tracing of users and root cauuses. The APMs of tomorrow will have to monitor the experience of individual users and when the experience is not satisfying, expose root causes with the precision of a specific line in source code.
Ivo Mägi
Co-founder and Head of Product, Plumbr

18. DIGITAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Application Performance Management tools must evolve to become Digital Performance Management. As the definition of "application" is both expanding and becoming more vague, it's important for these tools to focus on the customer experience end-to-end. That's essentially what we mean by digital performance.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

APM has historically been IT-centric, driven by operations and development, mainly to more efficiently identify and fix issues. However, this gives little or no thought to the digital customer experience. The most successful businesses are practicing what we call Digital Performance Management (DPM), using customer experience insights as a common language to foster collaboration and align priorities across these teams including business stakeholders. DPM collected analytics are uniquely positioned to help break silos by providing detailed insight around user behavior, delivered experience quality and the supporting applications and infrastructure health and performance across channels.
Erwan Paccard
Director of Customer Experience Marketing, Dynatrace

2016 will see the beginning of a mass transition from APM to DPM (Digital Performance Management) with emphasis on front-end performance measurement, testing and optimization based on analytics insights gained from the holy trinity of data - real user, business outcome and ops metrics.
Ann Ruckstuhl
CMO, SOASTA

19. APPLICATION-AWARE APM

The biggest evolution in application performance management will be application-aware solutions in the virtualized environment that tie the end user to the virtualized infrastructure that is delivering the application. As the management interface grows increasingly complex with virtual machines, hybrid cloud and hypervisor-based solutions, an evolution must take place to ensure that IT understands how their business critical applications are using compute, storage, network and virtualization resources on a user-by-user basis. As IT continues to evolve, monitoring solutions must also evolve to provide complete transparency throughout applications and all infrastructure layers.
Simon Taylor
President, Comtrade Software

Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 5, covering the impact of APM on the Business.

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 ...