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Choosing an APM Solution

New Ovum Decision Matrix Provides Guidance on APM
Michael Azoff

The market for Application Performance Management (APM) solutions continues to expand on the strength of innovation within the APM industry, resulting in new-generation tools, and also as a result of major shifts in IT usage around mobile and cloud, leading to demand for new APM capabilities.

To help IT decision-makers choose the right solution for their needs, the Ovum Decision Matrix on APM takes 10 of the leading APM solutions and evaluates and compares them side-by-side.

APM is Essential for Businesses, Providing Transparency into IT Applications and Infrastructure

APM is an essential activity for enterprises at multiple levels:

- During development, APM assists developers and QA staff with pre-release performance testing

- During live production, APM assists IT operations ensure mission-critical applications are running within the boundaries of SLAs (service-level agreements)

- APM supports the delivery of IT services to the business; advanced technology can preempt issues before end users are affected

- APM supports troubleshooting and defect-fixing when problems do occur

APM solutions monitor the IT environment, manage the gathering of metric data, and provide reports and dashboards for administrators, managers, and other stakeholders.

Cloud and Mobile Application Support is Essential for APM Solutions

APM remains a market with many different types of solutions, from hardware-based appliances to pure-software solutions. Typically, vendors approach the market with particular strengths and build out their coverage portfolio on top of these – for example, building solutions around complex event processing engines, or Big Data real-time analytics capabilities.

The market has seen a definite shift towards solutions supporting the latest mobile and cloud computing trends. As enterprises make better use of cloud services, and enterprise end users and consumers increasingly use smart mobile devices, the need to manage performance on these environments correspondingly grows. Another noticeable trend is the availability of APM-as-a-Service solutions.

Log Management Makes a Major Impact in APM

An emerging category within APM is log management, which has been growing at a strong pace with a number of new vendors joining the market; Splunk, in particular, has made quite a splash. These solutions mine the fields embedded in machine-generated data, including log files and headers in messages, and content that is generated by a host of applications from social network services such as Twitter, enterprise applications, and IT tools, including other APM solutions.

Log management tools process vast amounts of machine data in real time, exploiting Big Data technologies, so they represent a fusion of new technologies applied to existing categories of data. As the capabilities of log management tools are realized by users, developers write improved logs, creating a virtuous circle.

The incumbent APM vendors with Big Data capabilities are also addressing log management and are responding to this emerging solution category by better targeting their existing features.

To help enterprise IT users choose their APM tools, Ovum has recently published the Ovum Decision Matrix on APM 2014–15, which evaluates and compares 10 of the leading solutions in the market side-by-side.

Michael Azoff is a Principal Analyst at Ovum.

Related Links:

www.ovum.com

For Ovum Subscribers: Ovum Decision Matrix on APM 2014–15

Available from CA Technologies: Ovum Decision Matrix on APM 2014–15

Hot Topics

The Latest

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Choosing an APM Solution

New Ovum Decision Matrix Provides Guidance on APM
Michael Azoff

The market for Application Performance Management (APM) solutions continues to expand on the strength of innovation within the APM industry, resulting in new-generation tools, and also as a result of major shifts in IT usage around mobile and cloud, leading to demand for new APM capabilities.

To help IT decision-makers choose the right solution for their needs, the Ovum Decision Matrix on APM takes 10 of the leading APM solutions and evaluates and compares them side-by-side.

APM is Essential for Businesses, Providing Transparency into IT Applications and Infrastructure

APM is an essential activity for enterprises at multiple levels:

- During development, APM assists developers and QA staff with pre-release performance testing

- During live production, APM assists IT operations ensure mission-critical applications are running within the boundaries of SLAs (service-level agreements)

- APM supports the delivery of IT services to the business; advanced technology can preempt issues before end users are affected

- APM supports troubleshooting and defect-fixing when problems do occur

APM solutions monitor the IT environment, manage the gathering of metric data, and provide reports and dashboards for administrators, managers, and other stakeholders.

Cloud and Mobile Application Support is Essential for APM Solutions

APM remains a market with many different types of solutions, from hardware-based appliances to pure-software solutions. Typically, vendors approach the market with particular strengths and build out their coverage portfolio on top of these – for example, building solutions around complex event processing engines, or Big Data real-time analytics capabilities.

The market has seen a definite shift towards solutions supporting the latest mobile and cloud computing trends. As enterprises make better use of cloud services, and enterprise end users and consumers increasingly use smart mobile devices, the need to manage performance on these environments correspondingly grows. Another noticeable trend is the availability of APM-as-a-Service solutions.

Log Management Makes a Major Impact in APM

An emerging category within APM is log management, which has been growing at a strong pace with a number of new vendors joining the market; Splunk, in particular, has made quite a splash. These solutions mine the fields embedded in machine-generated data, including log files and headers in messages, and content that is generated by a host of applications from social network services such as Twitter, enterprise applications, and IT tools, including other APM solutions.

Log management tools process vast amounts of machine data in real time, exploiting Big Data technologies, so they represent a fusion of new technologies applied to existing categories of data. As the capabilities of log management tools are realized by users, developers write improved logs, creating a virtuous circle.

The incumbent APM vendors with Big Data capabilities are also addressing log management and are responding to this emerging solution category by better targeting their existing features.

To help enterprise IT users choose their APM tools, Ovum has recently published the Ovum Decision Matrix on APM 2014–15, which evaluates and compares 10 of the leading solutions in the market side-by-side.

Michael Azoff is a Principal Analyst at Ovum.

Related Links:

www.ovum.com

For Ovum Subscribers: Ovum Decision Matrix on APM 2014–15

Available from CA Technologies: Ovum Decision Matrix on APM 2014–15

Hot Topics

The Latest

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...