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30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 6

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 6, the final installment of the list, covers development and DevOps.

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

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 5

25. MICROSERVICES

Docker is going to disaggregate applications into hundreds and thousands of micro-services each of which will communicate with each other over virtual networks. APM tools need to evolve to technically step up to be able to monitor 100X or 1000X as many things and the transaction flows across those things as is the case today.
Bernd Harzog
CEO, OpsDataStore

We need to not only be able to understand the status of individual microservices, but also the state of the holistic microservice architecture itself as the complexity shifts from the internals of the application or service to the accelerating number of interdependencies. Understanding this latter perspective has been a challenge for even the most experienced of Web-scale firms.
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

26. API MANAGEMENT

APM providers are evolving to be one stop shops for all things application performance. Customers too are looking for solutions that fit well in their NOC or IT ecosystem. Over the years, we have learned, that any ecosystem play is impossible without a sound API strategy. As more tools enter the ecosystem, more APIs will be offered. Monitoring and managing the performance of those APIs will be critical to ensure the ecosystem harmony. As for the APM ecosystem, it's about time we start rethinking the conceptual APM framework and include API management and deep monitoring as an essential piece of APM.
Priyanka Tiwari
Product Marketing Manager, AlertSite, SmartBear

27. THE ENTIRE STACK

The introduction of RUM in the web performance world was a disruptive force. It was clear that occasional synthetic checks from a few locations around the world were wholly insufficient in understanding the behavior of web applications. I see the "RUM-trend" driving its way down stack. Synthetic checks against APIs, databases, micro services and even disks will slowly be displaced by the observation, recording and analysis of every single transaction. You will be able to profile every IOP on every spindle in your whole data center second by second – and people will wonder how we lived without before. We're close.
Theo Schlossnagle
Founder and CEO, Circonus

28. SSL DECRYPTION

With a high percentage of business applications now encrypted in SSL, decrypting SSL is imperative for effective APM. Given the high processing power required for SSL decryption that eats into the processing capacity left over for APM, organizations are best served by having a purpose-built network visibility solution offload SSL decryption from the APM tool.
Ananda Rajagopal
VP - Product Line Management, Gigamon

29. INTEGRATION WITH TESTING

One of the challenges with APM is to gap the chasm to performance testing and continuous integration. Load testing and APM need to work well together to enable the full vison of DevOps, but very few vendors have found a way to automate findings in APM to relevant tests and vice versa.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica

30. SUPPORT FOR CLIENT-SIDE TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION

Going forward, the most successful APM Vendors will be those who create and sustain competitive advantage based on effective support for client-side technology evolution, for example RUM refinements to support Single Page Applications or synthetic test visual endpoints. As always, most benefit will be delivered by accessibility/usability rather than "tick the box" support.
Larry Haig
Senior Consultant, Intechnica

If you have additional ideas about the evolution of Application Performance Management, send a blog to APMdigest.

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 ...

30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 6

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 6, the final installment of the list, covers development and DevOps.

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

Start with 30 Ways APM Should Evolve - Part 5

25. MICROSERVICES

Docker is going to disaggregate applications into hundreds and thousands of micro-services each of which will communicate with each other over virtual networks. APM tools need to evolve to technically step up to be able to monitor 100X or 1000X as many things and the transaction flows across those things as is the case today.
Bernd Harzog
CEO, OpsDataStore

We need to not only be able to understand the status of individual microservices, but also the state of the holistic microservice architecture itself as the complexity shifts from the internals of the application or service to the accelerating number of interdependencies. Understanding this latter perspective has been a challenge for even the most experienced of Web-scale firms.
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

26. API MANAGEMENT

APM providers are evolving to be one stop shops for all things application performance. Customers too are looking for solutions that fit well in their NOC or IT ecosystem. Over the years, we have learned, that any ecosystem play is impossible without a sound API strategy. As more tools enter the ecosystem, more APIs will be offered. Monitoring and managing the performance of those APIs will be critical to ensure the ecosystem harmony. As for the APM ecosystem, it's about time we start rethinking the conceptual APM framework and include API management and deep monitoring as an essential piece of APM.
Priyanka Tiwari
Product Marketing Manager, AlertSite, SmartBear

27. THE ENTIRE STACK

The introduction of RUM in the web performance world was a disruptive force. It was clear that occasional synthetic checks from a few locations around the world were wholly insufficient in understanding the behavior of web applications. I see the "RUM-trend" driving its way down stack. Synthetic checks against APIs, databases, micro services and even disks will slowly be displaced by the observation, recording and analysis of every single transaction. You will be able to profile every IOP on every spindle in your whole data center second by second – and people will wonder how we lived without before. We're close.
Theo Schlossnagle
Founder and CEO, Circonus

28. SSL DECRYPTION

With a high percentage of business applications now encrypted in SSL, decrypting SSL is imperative for effective APM. Given the high processing power required for SSL decryption that eats into the processing capacity left over for APM, organizations are best served by having a purpose-built network visibility solution offload SSL decryption from the APM tool.
Ananda Rajagopal
VP - Product Line Management, Gigamon

29. INTEGRATION WITH TESTING

One of the challenges with APM is to gap the chasm to performance testing and continuous integration. Load testing and APM need to work well together to enable the full vison of DevOps, but very few vendors have found a way to automate findings in APM to relevant tests and vice versa.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica

30. SUPPORT FOR CLIENT-SIDE TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION

Going forward, the most successful APM Vendors will be those who create and sustain competitive advantage based on effective support for client-side technology evolution, for example RUM refinements to support Single Page Applications or synthetic test visual endpoints. As always, most benefit will be delivered by accessibility/usability rather than "tick the box" support.
Larry Haig
Senior Consultant, Intechnica

If you have additional ideas about the evolution of Application Performance Management, send a blog to APMdigest.

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 ...