Skip to main content

4 Quick Questions on Gartner's APM Magic Quadrant

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Gartner's recently released Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring is one of the best reports to read if you want to get a handle on the future of the APM industry.

Jonah Kowall, Research Director, IT Operations Management at Gartner, answered the following four quick questions from APMdigest about the new report:

APM: During our interview in June, I asked "How do you rate the industry overall, in terms of the vendors' ability to deliver SaaS?" At the time you could not comment on the research in progress. Now that the Magic Quadrant for APM is out, what is your take on the maturity of the vendors with regard to SaaS?

JK: Pretty immature in general, but it's an area of rapid change. Most vendor solutions which are SaaS enabled focus on the commoditized and lower value synthetic transaction end user experience monitoring.

Additionally, most have not been designed to be portable to other service providers (think of a public cloud provider looking to add value added services), or offer self-service signup and management by the customer. This will start to become more pervasive in SaaS offerings.

APM: Which APM vendors are leaders in terms of a SaaS option - APM-as-a-Service?

JK: Enterprises have been consuming SaaS APM in the form of synthetic transactions for quite a while, and many organizations haven't evolved beyond that point.

That being said, there are 3 main slices of vendors in the synthetic testing area, the high end, middle tier, and low end. I will provide some example vendors in each:

High: Compuware, Keynote

Medium: Smartbear, Nustar, ManageEngine

Low: Pingdom, Monitis, Alertfox

There are many more here, but these are examples.

When looking at full-featured APM solutions, there are really only two right now who are offering a vendor-hosted APM SaaS product: AppDynamics and New Relic. The other folks have partial functionality in a SaaS deployment model, but like I said this will be changing.

Other APM products are deployed in MSP environments, specifically to service the MSPs customers.

APM: The new requirements for this year's APM Magic Quadrant - such as offering all 5 dimensions of APM, as well as a SaaS option - cut out a few vendors from the report. What is the potential for these vendors to be included in next year's Magic Quadrant?

JK: We only had a couple on the fence and they were due to SaaS capabilities and not meeting all five dimensions. There are at least a couple who will qualify for the research in 2013, if they execute their planned roadmaps. The same can be said for the few missing SaaS capabilities.

APM: I know it is early, but do you have any hints for us on any new requirements for next year?

JK: We have thoughts on this, some of which is outlined above - delivery models, partnerships or self-service. But we haven’t nailed anything down yet, and probably will not until late January. We will likely publish a note with the criteria changes for 2013 soon after that to get people thinking.

New requirements could also entail delivery of more than a single APM dimension as a service, which would eliminate most of the vendors if that were a requirement today.

Related Links:

Gartner Publishes Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring

Gartner's Five Dimensions of APM

Another Look At Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM

Q&A Part One: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About APM Cool Vendors

Q&A Part Two: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About SaaS APM

Q&A Part Three: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About Application Performance Management

Gartner Analyst Will Cappelli Talks about APM

Hot Topic
The Latest
The Latest 10

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 ...

4 Quick Questions on Gartner's APM Magic Quadrant

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Gartner's recently released Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring is one of the best reports to read if you want to get a handle on the future of the APM industry.

Jonah Kowall, Research Director, IT Operations Management at Gartner, answered the following four quick questions from APMdigest about the new report:

APM: During our interview in June, I asked "How do you rate the industry overall, in terms of the vendors' ability to deliver SaaS?" At the time you could not comment on the research in progress. Now that the Magic Quadrant for APM is out, what is your take on the maturity of the vendors with regard to SaaS?

JK: Pretty immature in general, but it's an area of rapid change. Most vendor solutions which are SaaS enabled focus on the commoditized and lower value synthetic transaction end user experience monitoring.

Additionally, most have not been designed to be portable to other service providers (think of a public cloud provider looking to add value added services), or offer self-service signup and management by the customer. This will start to become more pervasive in SaaS offerings.

APM: Which APM vendors are leaders in terms of a SaaS option - APM-as-a-Service?

JK: Enterprises have been consuming SaaS APM in the form of synthetic transactions for quite a while, and many organizations haven't evolved beyond that point.

That being said, there are 3 main slices of vendors in the synthetic testing area, the high end, middle tier, and low end. I will provide some example vendors in each:

High: Compuware, Keynote

Medium: Smartbear, Nustar, ManageEngine

Low: Pingdom, Monitis, Alertfox

There are many more here, but these are examples.

When looking at full-featured APM solutions, there are really only two right now who are offering a vendor-hosted APM SaaS product: AppDynamics and New Relic. The other folks have partial functionality in a SaaS deployment model, but like I said this will be changing.

Other APM products are deployed in MSP environments, specifically to service the MSPs customers.

APM: The new requirements for this year's APM Magic Quadrant - such as offering all 5 dimensions of APM, as well as a SaaS option - cut out a few vendors from the report. What is the potential for these vendors to be included in next year's Magic Quadrant?

JK: We only had a couple on the fence and they were due to SaaS capabilities and not meeting all five dimensions. There are at least a couple who will qualify for the research in 2013, if they execute their planned roadmaps. The same can be said for the few missing SaaS capabilities.

APM: I know it is early, but do you have any hints for us on any new requirements for next year?

JK: We have thoughts on this, some of which is outlined above - delivery models, partnerships or self-service. But we haven’t nailed anything down yet, and probably will not until late January. We will likely publish a note with the criteria changes for 2013 soon after that to get people thinking.

New requirements could also entail delivery of more than a single APM dimension as a service, which would eliminate most of the vendors if that were a requirement today.

Related Links:

Gartner Publishes Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring

Gartner's Five Dimensions of APM

Another Look At Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM

Q&A Part One: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About APM Cool Vendors

Q&A Part Two: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About SaaS APM

Q&A Part Three: Gartner Analyst Jonah Kowall Talks About Application Performance Management

Gartner Analyst Will Cappelli Talks about APM

Hot Topic
The Latest
The Latest 10

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 ...