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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

The Latest

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...