Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 3

The IoT is in position to become one of the greatest application performance management challenges faced by IT. APMdigest asked experts across the industry – including analysts, consultants and vendors – for their recommendations on how to ensure performance for IoT applications. Part 3 covers app design and development.

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 1

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 2

13. FLEXIBILITY

Your best bet when ensuring IoT performance is to design for flexibility. Don't get locked into any one specific vendor. The IoT landscape is not yet well-defined when it comes to standards, protocols, connectivity, security, and more. Prudent leaders expect that change will occur at some point. Consider the entire spectrum, from the sensors to the analytics platform. Your monitoring platform must be flexible enough to adapt quickly to new technologies and vendors as the market takes shape. For example, SNMP is not an IoT-friendly protocol. In order to monitor performance of a service, you'll need other hooks into the data. That's why – if you're designing your own IoTT services – you'll want to build performance telemeetry into the application from the get-go. Make it easy to publish usage, load, and other performance stats for consumption by any monitoring platform.
Antonio Piraino
CTO, ScienceLogic

Take a flexible, vendor-agnostic approach to application development. Creating IoT systems takes embedded development into a new level of complexity. To make it bearable, you want a verbose framework that has enough flexibility for arbitrary extendibility in terms of hardware, sensors or cloud providers — don't lock in too early with your software design. It's time to take "best software practices for re-usable code" back into action.
Tuukka Ahoniemi, PhD
Head of Strategy, Qt

14. FACE THE HARSH REALITY

Design for the harsh reality that "things" will experience so they can not only survive, but thrive when bad things happen. Bad things, such as extended loss of power or network connectivity, are to be expected and the IoT application must be able to gracefully deal with it.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

15. DESIGN FOR BANDWIDTH

The top way to ensure performance for the IoT is to understand round trip bandwidth constraints through practical experimentation and design to practical threshold to avoid a degraded user experience.
William C. Hurley
Senior Director of Enterprise Technology Solutions, Astadia

16. CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

You need to be able to quickly and reliably release changes to your IoT apps. Build a solid CI/CD pipeline to rapidly push out updates. You'll probably need it.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

17. PERFORMANCE TESTING

While you can't test every possible scenario, you must have a robust strategy to test your IoT application. Virtualization and infrastructure as code or "Things as Code" are strategies that can enable you to rapidly prove your application can handle a wide variety of real world conditions. Simply said, without virtualization and automated testing, your IoT effort will probably be DoA.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Performance test the "system" or "unit/device" as a standalone system. THEN, performance test the system as part of the larger IoT, or as we in Aerospace coined it, the "System of Systems." That's what IoT is: an interconnected web of systems that must perform under duress on a standalone basis, AND perform under duress as part of a much larger environment.
Dan Boutin
VP of Digital Strategy, SOASTA

18. SECURITY

Based on the IT Central Station traffic patterns, users seem to hold particular concern regarding the security within these networks.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

According to Gartner, the number of business-deployed IoT devices is going to double in the next three years. This will be a game changer for performance monitoring. Instead of servers and desktops, we'll be watching shipping containers, slot machines, or fuel pumps. IoT performance management will be more than just accounting for device or app availability and response time. IT teams need solutions to provide integrated insight into the communications of dynamic end points, to extract business data, and most importantly to stay on top of security issues. Already you're seeing DDoS attacks on IoT assets. These attacks are succeeding despite the fact that we have the forensic analysis capability to detect and mitigate the damage they cause. The key issue these days is industry education on the necessity of this capability, versus the old school view of security forensics as a luxury.
Douglas Roberts
VP and General Manager, Viavi Enterprise and Cloud Business Unit

Read Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 4, the final installment of the list, covering communication and the network.

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Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 3

The IoT is in position to become one of the greatest application performance management challenges faced by IT. APMdigest asked experts across the industry – including analysts, consultants and vendors – for their recommendations on how to ensure performance for IoT applications. Part 3 covers app design and development.

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 1

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 2

13. FLEXIBILITY

Your best bet when ensuring IoT performance is to design for flexibility. Don't get locked into any one specific vendor. The IoT landscape is not yet well-defined when it comes to standards, protocols, connectivity, security, and more. Prudent leaders expect that change will occur at some point. Consider the entire spectrum, from the sensors to the analytics platform. Your monitoring platform must be flexible enough to adapt quickly to new technologies and vendors as the market takes shape. For example, SNMP is not an IoT-friendly protocol. In order to monitor performance of a service, you'll need other hooks into the data. That's why – if you're designing your own IoTT services – you'll want to build performance telemeetry into the application from the get-go. Make it easy to publish usage, load, and other performance stats for consumption by any monitoring platform.
Antonio Piraino
CTO, ScienceLogic

Take a flexible, vendor-agnostic approach to application development. Creating IoT systems takes embedded development into a new level of complexity. To make it bearable, you want a verbose framework that has enough flexibility for arbitrary extendibility in terms of hardware, sensors or cloud providers — don't lock in too early with your software design. It's time to take "best software practices for re-usable code" back into action.
Tuukka Ahoniemi, PhD
Head of Strategy, Qt

14. FACE THE HARSH REALITY

Design for the harsh reality that "things" will experience so they can not only survive, but thrive when bad things happen. Bad things, such as extended loss of power or network connectivity, are to be expected and the IoT application must be able to gracefully deal with it.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

15. DESIGN FOR BANDWIDTH

The top way to ensure performance for the IoT is to understand round trip bandwidth constraints through practical experimentation and design to practical threshold to avoid a degraded user experience.
William C. Hurley
Senior Director of Enterprise Technology Solutions, Astadia

16. CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

You need to be able to quickly and reliably release changes to your IoT apps. Build a solid CI/CD pipeline to rapidly push out updates. You'll probably need it.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

17. PERFORMANCE TESTING

While you can't test every possible scenario, you must have a robust strategy to test your IoT application. Virtualization and infrastructure as code or "Things as Code" are strategies that can enable you to rapidly prove your application can handle a wide variety of real world conditions. Simply said, without virtualization and automated testing, your IoT effort will probably be DoA.
John Jerimiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Performance test the "system" or "unit/device" as a standalone system. THEN, performance test the system as part of the larger IoT, or as we in Aerospace coined it, the "System of Systems." That's what IoT is: an interconnected web of systems that must perform under duress on a standalone basis, AND perform under duress as part of a much larger environment.
Dan Boutin
VP of Digital Strategy, SOASTA

18. SECURITY

Based on the IT Central Station traffic patterns, users seem to hold particular concern regarding the security within these networks.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

According to Gartner, the number of business-deployed IoT devices is going to double in the next three years. This will be a game changer for performance monitoring. Instead of servers and desktops, we'll be watching shipping containers, slot machines, or fuel pumps. IoT performance management will be more than just accounting for device or app availability and response time. IT teams need solutions to provide integrated insight into the communications of dynamic end points, to extract business data, and most importantly to stay on top of security issues. Already you're seeing DDoS attacks on IoT assets. These attacks are succeeding despite the fact that we have the forensic analysis capability to detect and mitigate the damage they cause. The key issue these days is industry education on the necessity of this capability, versus the old school view of security forensics as a luxury.
Douglas Roberts
VP and General Manager, Viavi Enterprise and Cloud Business Unit

Read Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 4, the final installment of the list, covering communication and the network.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...