Skip to main content

Gartner Releases 2014 Magic Quadrant for APM

Gartner released the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring report, by Research VPs Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli.

The report noted an increased importance in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery method for Application Performance Management (APM) capabilities: “Users are growing ever more convinced that there is little or no functional or performance loss when consuming APM through a SaaS delivery mode. In fact, security and operations issues can often be reduced or eliminated by consuming SaaS technologies. At the same time, the advantages of a zero-management platform and reduced maintenance and continuous feature evolution are becoming ever more salient in a ‘do more for less’ and DevOps-influenced IT environment.”

The report predicts, "By 2017 50% of application performance monitoring (APM) deployments that fulfill all five dimensions of functionality will be primarily SaaS, up from under 20% today."

The five dimensions of functionality include:

■ End-user experience monitoring (EUM)

■ Application topology discovery and visualization

■ User-defined transaction profiling

■ Application component deep dive

■ IT Operations Analytics (ITOA)

In the report, Gartner also noted key shifts in the functional emphasis of solutions in the changing APM market this year. “First, driven by the increasing significance of mobile application endpoints and dynamic Web technology, EUM is becoming even more important than it currently is to enterprises,” states the report.

"Second, the 2013 argument between an approach to application performance analytics that would couple ITOA functionality tightly to an APM portfolio and one that envisioned APM as one discipline that used a domain-independent ITOA platform, among others, will be decided in favor of the latter approach."

Evaluation criteria for "completeness of vision" included market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, product strategy, business model, vertical and industry strategy, innovation, and geographic strategy. Criteria for "ability to execute" included product, overall viability, sales execution and pricing, market responsiveness and record, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations. Gartner positions each vendor on two axes — Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute — which lands them in a particular Quadrant. Those who demonstrate market understanding on both axes are placed in the top right "Leaders" quadrant. In this report, AppDynamics, Compuware (now Dynatrace) and New Relic, were placed in the Leaders quadrant. The other vendors featured in the report include AppNeta, BMC, CA Technologies, HP, IBM, ManageEngine, Microsoft, Riverbed Technology and SmartBear.

“The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a particularly credible metric because of the meticulous methodology they follow in researching the marketplace," says Jyoti Bansal, AppDynamics founder and CEO. "Gartner’s APM analysts interview hundreds of customers who are APM users. The Magic Quadrant report reflects the feedback from these actual users, as well as other evaluation criteria and the expertise of Gartner’s analysts, and is widely used and trusted by APM buyers.”

Several links to the report are available below.

The Latest

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...

In today's fast-paced AI landscape, CIOs, IT leaders, and engineers are constantly challenged to manage increasingly complex and interconnected systems. The sheer scale and velocity of data generated by modern infrastructure can be overwhelming, making it difficult to maintain uptime, prevent outages, and create a seamless customer experience. This complexity is magnified by the industry's shift towards agentic AI ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 19, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA explains the cause of the AWS outage in October ... 

The explosion of generative AI and machine learning capabilities has fundamentally changed the conversation around cloud migration. It's no longer just about modernization or cost savings — it's about being able to compete in a market where AI is rapidly becoming table stakes. Companies that can't quickly spin up AI workloads, feed models with data at scale, or experiment with new capabilities are falling behind faster than ever before. But here's what I'm seeing: many organizations want to capitalize on AI, but they're stuck ...

On September 16, the world celebrated the 10th annual IT Pro Day, giving companies a chance to laud the professionals who serve as the backbone to almost every successful business across the globe. Despite the growing importance of their roles, many IT pros still work in the background and often go underappreciated ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping observability, and observability is becoming essential for AI. This is a two-way relationship that is increasingly relevant as enterprises scale generative AI ... This dual role makes AI and observability inseparable. In this blog, I cover more details of each side ...

Gartner Releases 2014 Magic Quadrant for APM

Gartner released the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring report, by Research VPs Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli.

The report noted an increased importance in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery method for Application Performance Management (APM) capabilities: “Users are growing ever more convinced that there is little or no functional or performance loss when consuming APM through a SaaS delivery mode. In fact, security and operations issues can often be reduced or eliminated by consuming SaaS technologies. At the same time, the advantages of a zero-management platform and reduced maintenance and continuous feature evolution are becoming ever more salient in a ‘do more for less’ and DevOps-influenced IT environment.”

The report predicts, "By 2017 50% of application performance monitoring (APM) deployments that fulfill all five dimensions of functionality will be primarily SaaS, up from under 20% today."

The five dimensions of functionality include:

■ End-user experience monitoring (EUM)

■ Application topology discovery and visualization

■ User-defined transaction profiling

■ Application component deep dive

■ IT Operations Analytics (ITOA)

In the report, Gartner also noted key shifts in the functional emphasis of solutions in the changing APM market this year. “First, driven by the increasing significance of mobile application endpoints and dynamic Web technology, EUM is becoming even more important than it currently is to enterprises,” states the report.

"Second, the 2013 argument between an approach to application performance analytics that would couple ITOA functionality tightly to an APM portfolio and one that envisioned APM as one discipline that used a domain-independent ITOA platform, among others, will be decided in favor of the latter approach."

Evaluation criteria for "completeness of vision" included market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, product strategy, business model, vertical and industry strategy, innovation, and geographic strategy. Criteria for "ability to execute" included product, overall viability, sales execution and pricing, market responsiveness and record, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations. Gartner positions each vendor on two axes — Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute — which lands them in a particular Quadrant. Those who demonstrate market understanding on both axes are placed in the top right "Leaders" quadrant. In this report, AppDynamics, Compuware (now Dynatrace) and New Relic, were placed in the Leaders quadrant. The other vendors featured in the report include AppNeta, BMC, CA Technologies, HP, IBM, ManageEngine, Microsoft, Riverbed Technology and SmartBear.

“The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a particularly credible metric because of the meticulous methodology they follow in researching the marketplace," says Jyoti Bansal, AppDynamics founder and CEO. "Gartner’s APM analysts interview hundreds of customers who are APM users. The Magic Quadrant report reflects the feedback from these actual users, as well as other evaluation criteria and the expertise of Gartner’s analysts, and is widely used and trusted by APM buyers.”

Several links to the report are available below.

The Latest

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...

In today's fast-paced AI landscape, CIOs, IT leaders, and engineers are constantly challenged to manage increasingly complex and interconnected systems. The sheer scale and velocity of data generated by modern infrastructure can be overwhelming, making it difficult to maintain uptime, prevent outages, and create a seamless customer experience. This complexity is magnified by the industry's shift towards agentic AI ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 19, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA explains the cause of the AWS outage in October ... 

The explosion of generative AI and machine learning capabilities has fundamentally changed the conversation around cloud migration. It's no longer just about modernization or cost savings — it's about being able to compete in a market where AI is rapidly becoming table stakes. Companies that can't quickly spin up AI workloads, feed models with data at scale, or experiment with new capabilities are falling behind faster than ever before. But here's what I'm seeing: many organizations want to capitalize on AI, but they're stuck ...

On September 16, the world celebrated the 10th annual IT Pro Day, giving companies a chance to laud the professionals who serve as the backbone to almost every successful business across the globe. Despite the growing importance of their roles, many IT pros still work in the background and often go underappreciated ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping observability, and observability is becoming essential for AI. This is a two-way relationship that is increasingly relevant as enterprises scale generative AI ... This dual role makes AI and observability inseparable. In this blog, I cover more details of each side ...