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Next Steps for ITOA - Part 3

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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Next Steps for ITOA - Part 3

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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...