Gartner Q&A: Cameron Haight Talks About APM - Part 3

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

In Part 3 of this exclusive interview, Cameron Haight, Gartner Research VP, IT Operations, discusses the new focus of his research: Application Performance Management (APM).

Start with Part 1 of the interview

Start with Part 2 of the interview

APM: Now let's talk about APM. When you look at APM today, what is your overall assessment of APM as an industry?

CH: It has been eight years plus since I directly covered APM, although I have been keeping track of some parts of it. But as I look at how Gartner identifies APM functionality today, we define APM with five functional requirements, but none of those are new. In the past we were doing end-user monitoring, application topology discovery and visualization, transaction profiling, component deep dives. Analytics were not very big in the past. The concept of analytics is not new but it is relatively new being applied to the APM domain.

So for me it wasn't like that scene in the movie Somewhere in Time where Christopher Reeve goes back in time wearing the completely wrong style of clothing for the era. My lapels might be a little wider back in that day, but it isn't like this is totally different than what I saw eight years ago. Some of the APM vendors may beg to differ with me. We will find out.

I think the technology has gotten better. Certainly in some areas. SaaS was not that big eight years ago. We had MSPs and ASPs before, but that was not a very successful business model in the early 2000 timeframe. Now it is more and more. But I don't see SaaS as necessarily providing a better function. It is providing a different delivery mechanism that improves the consumption of the service to be sure. And I think it has the potential to provide better function, by the way. But I don't necessarily see that today.

APM: You mention Gartner's definition of APM, with the five components. Do you foresee any changes to this definition?

CH: At Gartner, we are sensitive to the fact that what we do has a market impact. So any changes, if they were to occur, would not happen overnight. I'm not envisioning any changes, in the short-term. It seems to be working so far in terms of what Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli (former and current Gartner Analysts) have been doing. They have recognized that a well featured APM tool should have these capabilities. They've captured a good pattern so far.

APM: What is your take on the fact that so many companies are still not using APM, despite its popularity and obvious benefits?

CH: As an outside observer of APM, I think we build a lot of complexity into these tools. And the complexity or price performance trade-off may not be there for a lot of companies.

I did a presentation a couple years ago on complexity. In the presentation I said that I don't have enterprise clients calling me and saying I have a complexity problem. But interestingly enough when you talk to them, complexity bubbles up as the underlying cause, whether it's complexity in process, complexity in organizational structure, complexity in technology. We make it very difficult to consume a lot of IT Operations Management (ITOM) and APM tools. It is probably an overused example but I always like to point to smartphones. That is a very complex device. No one ever picks up a manual to use it. So why can't we take the same approach to the tools that manage IT?

APM: Make IT tools more intuitive?

CH: Yes – a lot.

APM: So you're saying that complexity increases the cost, and makes it harder for people to adopt it? They need an expert or maybe a team of experts, etc.?

CH: Yes, like in the case when using SaaS. It solves the maintenance and deployment complexity but doesn't necessarily solve the user interaction complexity. Very few of these tools, based on my past history, enable you to pick up and say I know how to use this. It takes some time and training to use it. By the way this is not just APM. This is the whole portfolio of enterprise software from ERP to databases to everything else that we use every day in IT. It takes a lot of work and pain to make them work. That's why some companies say: enough. We are going to put this in the cloud and consume it from someone else, but even then we have other kinds of complexities, so it never totally goes away.

APM: In your recent blog you touch on the exponential growth of APM generated big data, with factors looming on the horizon like the Internet of Things. Do you feel APM today is not equipped to handle this deluge of data?

CH: It was more of a question because I don't know. Are we designing systems to manage hundreds of thousands of objects? Do we need to manage hundreds of thousands of objects? I don't think we are doing a great job managing what we already have. And the numbers on the horizon are kind of scary if in fact we are tasked to manage them. Analytics will hopefully address some of this, cut through the digital tsunami of info and data. But even then, are we really improving our situational awareness? It is a question more than anything else.

APM: Do you mean the IT user's situational awareness of the environment?

CH: Yes. What do we need to focus on here and now? How are our OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loops improving, so that we can take the actions we need to prevent bad things from happening?

Look at other areas where sensory overload can result in disasters, like with airplanes. An automation system decides to stop working and the situational awareness is not there for the humans in the cockpit. Fortunately we don't face that life-and-death struggle in IT, but I would assert that we still have a lot of things going on in a typical NOC (Network Operations Center) environment, that we just don't know have a good handle on.

Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli have done a great job in covering this area, and I will have big shoes to fill. One of the points I would like to focus on is improving situational awareness. It is not going to be just a technology enhancement to make that happen. We have to rethink how the workplace and the processes are designed as well.

ABOUT Cameron Haight

Cameron Haight is VP in Gartner Research. His primary research focus is on IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Application Performance Management (APM). His previous focus was on DevOps and associated technologies, processes and organizational structures. He has also developed the concept of web-scale IT, which seeks to enable enterprises to develop capabilities typically found only in large cloud services providers, such as Amazon and Google. Prior to Gartner, Haight worked at both BMC Software and IBM.

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Gartner Q&A: Cameron Haight Talks About APM - Part 3

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

In Part 3 of this exclusive interview, Cameron Haight, Gartner Research VP, IT Operations, discusses the new focus of his research: Application Performance Management (APM).

Start with Part 1 of the interview

Start with Part 2 of the interview

APM: Now let's talk about APM. When you look at APM today, what is your overall assessment of APM as an industry?

CH: It has been eight years plus since I directly covered APM, although I have been keeping track of some parts of it. But as I look at how Gartner identifies APM functionality today, we define APM with five functional requirements, but none of those are new. In the past we were doing end-user monitoring, application topology discovery and visualization, transaction profiling, component deep dives. Analytics were not very big in the past. The concept of analytics is not new but it is relatively new being applied to the APM domain.

So for me it wasn't like that scene in the movie Somewhere in Time where Christopher Reeve goes back in time wearing the completely wrong style of clothing for the era. My lapels might be a little wider back in that day, but it isn't like this is totally different than what I saw eight years ago. Some of the APM vendors may beg to differ with me. We will find out.

I think the technology has gotten better. Certainly in some areas. SaaS was not that big eight years ago. We had MSPs and ASPs before, but that was not a very successful business model in the early 2000 timeframe. Now it is more and more. But I don't see SaaS as necessarily providing a better function. It is providing a different delivery mechanism that improves the consumption of the service to be sure. And I think it has the potential to provide better function, by the way. But I don't necessarily see that today.

APM: You mention Gartner's definition of APM, with the five components. Do you foresee any changes to this definition?

CH: At Gartner, we are sensitive to the fact that what we do has a market impact. So any changes, if they were to occur, would not happen overnight. I'm not envisioning any changes, in the short-term. It seems to be working so far in terms of what Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli (former and current Gartner Analysts) have been doing. They have recognized that a well featured APM tool should have these capabilities. They've captured a good pattern so far.

APM: What is your take on the fact that so many companies are still not using APM, despite its popularity and obvious benefits?

CH: As an outside observer of APM, I think we build a lot of complexity into these tools. And the complexity or price performance trade-off may not be there for a lot of companies.

I did a presentation a couple years ago on complexity. In the presentation I said that I don't have enterprise clients calling me and saying I have a complexity problem. But interestingly enough when you talk to them, complexity bubbles up as the underlying cause, whether it's complexity in process, complexity in organizational structure, complexity in technology. We make it very difficult to consume a lot of IT Operations Management (ITOM) and APM tools. It is probably an overused example but I always like to point to smartphones. That is a very complex device. No one ever picks up a manual to use it. So why can't we take the same approach to the tools that manage IT?

APM: Make IT tools more intuitive?

CH: Yes – a lot.

APM: So you're saying that complexity increases the cost, and makes it harder for people to adopt it? They need an expert or maybe a team of experts, etc.?

CH: Yes, like in the case when using SaaS. It solves the maintenance and deployment complexity but doesn't necessarily solve the user interaction complexity. Very few of these tools, based on my past history, enable you to pick up and say I know how to use this. It takes some time and training to use it. By the way this is not just APM. This is the whole portfolio of enterprise software from ERP to databases to everything else that we use every day in IT. It takes a lot of work and pain to make them work. That's why some companies say: enough. We are going to put this in the cloud and consume it from someone else, but even then we have other kinds of complexities, so it never totally goes away.

APM: In your recent blog you touch on the exponential growth of APM generated big data, with factors looming on the horizon like the Internet of Things. Do you feel APM today is not equipped to handle this deluge of data?

CH: It was more of a question because I don't know. Are we designing systems to manage hundreds of thousands of objects? Do we need to manage hundreds of thousands of objects? I don't think we are doing a great job managing what we already have. And the numbers on the horizon are kind of scary if in fact we are tasked to manage them. Analytics will hopefully address some of this, cut through the digital tsunami of info and data. But even then, are we really improving our situational awareness? It is a question more than anything else.

APM: Do you mean the IT user's situational awareness of the environment?

CH: Yes. What do we need to focus on here and now? How are our OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loops improving, so that we can take the actions we need to prevent bad things from happening?

Look at other areas where sensory overload can result in disasters, like with airplanes. An automation system decides to stop working and the situational awareness is not there for the humans in the cockpit. Fortunately we don't face that life-and-death struggle in IT, but I would assert that we still have a lot of things going on in a typical NOC (Network Operations Center) environment, that we just don't know have a good handle on.

Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli have done a great job in covering this area, and I will have big shoes to fill. One of the points I would like to focus on is improving situational awareness. It is not going to be just a technology enhancement to make that happen. We have to rethink how the workplace and the processes are designed as well.

ABOUT Cameron Haight

Cameron Haight is VP in Gartner Research. His primary research focus is on IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Application Performance Management (APM). His previous focus was on DevOps and associated technologies, processes and organizational structures. He has also developed the concept of web-scale IT, which seeks to enable enterprises to develop capabilities typically found only in large cloud services providers, such as Amazon and Google. Prior to Gartner, Haight worked at both BMC Software and IBM.

Related Links

The Latest
The Latest 10

The Latest

Three Strikes and They're Gone: Why Proactive Operations is Now a Customer Retention Strategy

IT organizations have historically measured success by how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong. The entire discipline of Incident Management has been optimized around mean time to resolution, first-response SLAs and ticket closure rates. But new research suggests that even though this is a well-executed playbook, it's no longer enough to retain customers ...

When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

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 ...

From Cleanup to Prevention: The Future of Cloud-Native Cost Optimization

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 ...

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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 ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

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 ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

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 ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

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 ...

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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 ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

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 ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

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 ...