Skip to main content

Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM

Gartner's recently published Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring defines “five distinct dimensions of, or perspectives on, end-to-end application performance” which are essential to APM, listed below.

Gartner points out that although each of these five technologies are distinct, and often deployed by different stakeholders, there is “a high-level, circular workflow that weaves the five dimensions together.”

1. End-user experience monitoring

End-user experience monitoring is the first step, which captures data on how end-to-end performance impacts the user, and identifies the problem.

2. Runtime application architecture discovery, modeling and display

The second step, the software and hardware components involved in application execution, and their communication paths, are studied to establish the potential scope of the problem.

3. User-defined transaction profiling

The third step involves examining user-defined transactions, as they move across the paths defined in step two, to identify the source of the problem.

4. Component deep-dive monitoring in application context

The fourth step is conducting deep-dive monitoring of the resources consumed by, and events occurring within, the components discovered in step two.

5. Analytics

The final step is the use of analytics – including technologies such as behavior learning engines – to crunch the data generated in the first four steps, discover meaningful and actionable patterns, pinpoint the root cause of the problem, and ultimately anticipate future issues that may impact the end user.

Applying the 5 dimensions to your APM purchase

“These five functionalities represent more or less the conceptual model that enterprise buyers have in their heads – what constitutes the application performance monitoring space, ” explains Will Cappelli, Gartner Research VP in Enterprise Management and co-author of the Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring.

“If you go back and look at the various head-to-head competitions and marketing arguments that took place even as recently as two years ago, you see vendors pushing one of the five functional areas as: what you need in order to do APM,” Cappelli recalls. “I think it's only because of the persistent demand on the part of enterprise buyers, that they needed all five capabilities, that drove the vendors to populate their portfolios in a way that would adequately reflect those five functionalities.”

The question is: should one vendor be supplying all five capabilities?

“You will see enterprises typically selecting one vendor as their strategic supplier for APM,” Cappelli continues, “but if that vendor does not have all the pieces of the puzzle, the enterprise will supplement with capabilities from some other vendor. This can make a lot of sense.”

“When you look at some of the big suites, and even the vendors that offer all five functionalities, in most cases those vendors have assembled those functionalities out of technologies they have picked up when they acquired many diverse vendors. Even when you go out to buy a suite from one of the larger vendors that offers everything across the board, at the end of the day you are left with very distinct products even if they all share a common name.”

For this reason, Cappelli says there is usually very little technology advantage associated with selecting a single APM vendor over going with multiple vendors providing best-of-breed products for each of the five dimensions. However, he notes that there can be a significant advantage to minimizing the number of vendors you have to deal with.

“Because APM suites, whether assembled by yourself or by a vendor, are complex entities, it is important to have the vendor support that can span across the suite,” Cappelli says. “So in general it makes sense to go with a vendor that can support you at least across the majority of the functionalities that you want.”

“But you do need to be aware that the advantage derived from going down that path – choosing a single vendor rather than multiple vendors – has more to do with that vendor's ability to support you in solving a complex problem rather than any kind of inherent technological advantage derived from some kind of pre-existing integration.”

Related Links:

Another Look At Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM

Click here to read Part One of the APMdigest interview with Will Cappelli, Gartner Research VP in Enterprise Management.

Click here to read Part Two of the APMdigest interview with Will Cappelli, Gartner Research VP in Enterprise Management.

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM

Gartner's recently published Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring defines “five distinct dimensions of, or perspectives on, end-to-end application performance” which are essential to APM, listed below.

Gartner points out that although each of these five technologies are distinct, and often deployed by different stakeholders, there is “a high-level, circular workflow that weaves the five dimensions together.”

1. End-user experience monitoring

End-user experience monitoring is the first step, which captures data on how end-to-end performance impacts the user, and identifies the problem.

2. Runtime application architecture discovery, modeling and display

The second step, the software and hardware components involved in application execution, and their communication paths, are studied to establish the potential scope of the problem.

3. User-defined transaction profiling

The third step involves examining user-defined transactions, as they move across the paths defined in step two, to identify the source of the problem.

4. Component deep-dive monitoring in application context

The fourth step is conducting deep-dive monitoring of the resources consumed by, and events occurring within, the components discovered in step two.

5. Analytics

The final step is the use of analytics – including technologies such as behavior learning engines – to crunch the data generated in the first four steps, discover meaningful and actionable patterns, pinpoint the root cause of the problem, and ultimately anticipate future issues that may impact the end user.

Applying the 5 dimensions to your APM purchase

“These five functionalities represent more or less the conceptual model that enterprise buyers have in their heads – what constitutes the application performance monitoring space, ” explains Will Cappelli, Gartner Research VP in Enterprise Management and co-author of the Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring.

“If you go back and look at the various head-to-head competitions and marketing arguments that took place even as recently as two years ago, you see vendors pushing one of the five functional areas as: what you need in order to do APM,” Cappelli recalls. “I think it's only because of the persistent demand on the part of enterprise buyers, that they needed all five capabilities, that drove the vendors to populate their portfolios in a way that would adequately reflect those five functionalities.”

The question is: should one vendor be supplying all five capabilities?

“You will see enterprises typically selecting one vendor as their strategic supplier for APM,” Cappelli continues, “but if that vendor does not have all the pieces of the puzzle, the enterprise will supplement with capabilities from some other vendor. This can make a lot of sense.”

“When you look at some of the big suites, and even the vendors that offer all five functionalities, in most cases those vendors have assembled those functionalities out of technologies they have picked up when they acquired many diverse vendors. Even when you go out to buy a suite from one of the larger vendors that offers everything across the board, at the end of the day you are left with very distinct products even if they all share a common name.”

For this reason, Cappelli says there is usually very little technology advantage associated with selecting a single APM vendor over going with multiple vendors providing best-of-breed products for each of the five dimensions. However, he notes that there can be a significant advantage to minimizing the number of vendors you have to deal with.

“Because APM suites, whether assembled by yourself or by a vendor, are complex entities, it is important to have the vendor support that can span across the suite,” Cappelli says. “So in general it makes sense to go with a vendor that can support you at least across the majority of the functionalities that you want.”

“But you do need to be aware that the advantage derived from going down that path – choosing a single vendor rather than multiple vendors – has more to do with that vendor's ability to support you in solving a complex problem rather than any kind of inherent technological advantage derived from some kind of pre-existing integration.”

Related Links:

Another Look At Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM

Click here to read Part One of the APMdigest interview with Will Cappelli, Gartner Research VP in Enterprise Management.

Click here to read Part Two of the APMdigest interview with Will Cappelli, Gartner Research VP in Enterprise Management.

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...