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30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 5

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 5 covers the impact of APM on the Business.

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

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 4

20. ALIGN IT TRANSACTIONS WITH BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

APM must evolve to be more of a solution that analyzes how the business is impacted by IT. Currently, APM solutions focus on the technical details around latency or failures in infrastructure. Rarely, are these solutions usable by the IT liaison to the business, or the business itself. The next step in APM evolution should be to map business objectives or milestones to IT transactions and provide feedback to the business on the status of these objectives – whether they are compliance, order volume or process execution related.
Charley Rich
VP Product Management and Marketing, Nastel Technologies

21. FOCUS ON BUSINESS SERVICES

One key area which APM vendors have to recognize is a current weakness that must be quickly addressed is that the compelling business driver is not just ensuring the health, availability, and performance of "applications" but the business services which they support ... IT organizations are demanding a full stack, business service-oriented solution. The first vendors that get there with a complete story (and, more importantly, a complete set of capabilities) will be favored to win the long-term APM vendor race.
Bob Johnson
CMO, Optanix

Read Bob Johnson's blog: APM Evolution: Business Service Performance

22. DRIVING BUSINESS ANALYTICS

APM will be a driver for business analytics and this is currently the only way to really evolve APM technology. Supporting new technologies is no longer a USP but merely a way to survive.
APM agents have a real advantage in the way they can enrich business analytics via intelligent instrumenting and analyzing the data that they see.
Coen Meerbeek
Online Performance Consultant and Founder of Blue Factory Internet

23. SUPPORT FOR LOB

From looking at the product reviews of APM solutions on IT Central Station, I see that APM users want their tools to better serve the needs of the Line of Business (LOB). Reviewers of APM solutions, whether they are DevOps managers, applications owners, CIOs or operations managers, express the need for their APM tools to offer value to their peers in the LOB. Their wish lists include improved analytics, proactive monitoring of business transactions, and integration with business dashboards – all features that will enable APM to better align with the business.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Click here to read the latest APM product reviews on IT Central Station

24. SUPPORT FOR EMPLOYEES

Application Performance Management tools must be designed for today's consumerization of IT to provide the ease-of-use that employees crave but without forsaking the security IT teams demand for protection and compliance. Quite simply, these tools must help employees easily get the job done, especially since today's modern enterprise faces increasing IT complexity that forces teams to do more with less, while at the same time provide IT teams secure control over what is sent in and out of their organizations. It is crucial that these tools meet the demands of modern business because any potential security issue or non-compliant transfer can end up creating a situation of non-compliance and cost the company thousands of dollars or worse.
Jeff Loeb
CMO, Ipswitch

Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 6, covering development and DevOps.

Hot Topics

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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 5

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 5 covers the impact of APM on the Business.

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

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 4

20. ALIGN IT TRANSACTIONS WITH BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

APM must evolve to be more of a solution that analyzes how the business is impacted by IT. Currently, APM solutions focus on the technical details around latency or failures in infrastructure. Rarely, are these solutions usable by the IT liaison to the business, or the business itself. The next step in APM evolution should be to map business objectives or milestones to IT transactions and provide feedback to the business on the status of these objectives – whether they are compliance, order volume or process execution related.
Charley Rich
VP Product Management and Marketing, Nastel Technologies

21. FOCUS ON BUSINESS SERVICES

One key area which APM vendors have to recognize is a current weakness that must be quickly addressed is that the compelling business driver is not just ensuring the health, availability, and performance of "applications" but the business services which they support ... IT organizations are demanding a full stack, business service-oriented solution. The first vendors that get there with a complete story (and, more importantly, a complete set of capabilities) will be favored to win the long-term APM vendor race.
Bob Johnson
CMO, Optanix

Read Bob Johnson's blog: APM Evolution: Business Service Performance

22. DRIVING BUSINESS ANALYTICS

APM will be a driver for business analytics and this is currently the only way to really evolve APM technology. Supporting new technologies is no longer a USP but merely a way to survive.
APM agents have a real advantage in the way they can enrich business analytics via intelligent instrumenting and analyzing the data that they see.
Coen Meerbeek
Online Performance Consultant and Founder of Blue Factory Internet

23. SUPPORT FOR LOB

From looking at the product reviews of APM solutions on IT Central Station, I see that APM users want their tools to better serve the needs of the Line of Business (LOB). Reviewers of APM solutions, whether they are DevOps managers, applications owners, CIOs or operations managers, express the need for their APM tools to offer value to their peers in the LOB. Their wish lists include improved analytics, proactive monitoring of business transactions, and integration with business dashboards – all features that will enable APM to better align with the business.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Click here to read the latest APM product reviews on IT Central Station

24. SUPPORT FOR EMPLOYEES

Application Performance Management tools must be designed for today's consumerization of IT to provide the ease-of-use that employees crave but without forsaking the security IT teams demand for protection and compliance. Quite simply, these tools must help employees easily get the job done, especially since today's modern enterprise faces increasing IT complexity that forces teams to do more with less, while at the same time provide IT teams secure control over what is sent in and out of their organizations. It is crucial that these tools meet the demands of modern business because any potential security issue or non-compliant transfer can end up creating a situation of non-compliance and cost the company thousands of dollars or worse.
Jeff Loeb
CMO, Ipswitch

Read 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 6, covering development and DevOps.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...