APMdigest asked experts across the industry — including analysts, consultants and vendors — for their opinions on the next steps for ITOA. These next steps include where the experts believe ITOA is headed, as well as where they think it should be headed. Part 3 covers monitoring and user experience.
Start with Next Steps for ITOA - Part 1
Start with Next Steps for ITOA - Part 2
MONITORING INTEGRATES WITH ITOA
Advanced analytics and machine learning will become table stakes in monitoring tools. Initially this will create a flurry of unsubstantiated rebranding efforts by vendors eager to catch up, but these will eventually either acquire their way into ITOA or exit the market.
Trace3 Research 360 View Trend Report: IT Operations Monitoring & Analytics (ITOMA)
USER EXPERIENCE
As powerful as APM tools are, they have always been application- or infrastructure-centric and have therefore missed a very important piece of the puzzle: the actual users. I predict that IT departments, with the encouragement of corporate management, will not only begin to recognize the value of understanding user experience and behavior, but will take the lead in leveraging these analytics to improve the quality of service they deliver. They will begin integrating user analytics as a core capability within their toolset to see exactly what happens when users enter information and navigate through screens. These unique insights will help them improve problem resolution, system performance, process optimization, employee efficiency and more.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MONITORING
In a customer-centric age, empowered users are accustomed to getting extremely high levels of service, a reality that is forcing companies to evolve traditional performance monitoring into what Gartner now calls digital experience monitoring (DEM). DEM treats the user experience as the ultimate metric, and identifies how the myriad of underlying services, systems and components influence it. DEM is far more multi-dimensional than past end user experience monitoring approaches. IT Operations Analytics will evolve concurrently with DEM, handling more complexity (ingesting and analyzing more data from more sources), and increasing diagnostic accuracy and speed.
Dennis Callaghan
Director of Industry Innovation, Catchpoint
MONITOR WHAT MATTERS
We will see a significant shift away from "monitor everything", and a return to "monitor what matters." But this time, "what matters" will be determined algorithmically, not by policy, and consequently the performance data will be more adaptive and relevant.
Richard Whitehead
Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft
PREDICTABILITY
IT Operations Analytics (ITOA), in relation to performance management has yet to deliver the first promise of analytics: predictability. Although there are a number of interesting solutions around that are that advanced, especially in areas like network management (in combination with vertical/domain problems), the market has yet to witness an easy-to-use, intelligent solution that can see within the crystal ball and predict outages, failures and problems.
Goran Garevski
VP of Engineering, Comtrade Software
Read Next Steps for ITOA - Part 4, covering automation and dynamic IT environment.