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Keep Your Application Monitoring Out of the Dark Ages

The right blend of APM and microservices can bring your organization into the enlightened age
Matthew Dubie

Let's go back in time. Think of when your applications used to run from a single server and when the monolithic enterprise management software approach was more than enough to effectively monitor them. I know those days may have been just 10 years ago, but given the fast pace of the tech industry, those are officially our dark ages.

Now, let's fast-forward to the present application economy in which your customers are demanding higher quality applications faster than ever before. To meet these new expectations, the infrastructure of the application has evolved; inevitably becoming more sophisticated and ultimately more complex.

The complexity begins with the microservices architecture, which is the way many of today's enterprise applications are built. Microservices compartmentalize the application by function. Each function within the application architecture focuses on performing a small, specific process and communicates with other functions using APIs. This differs from the traditional service-oriented architecture (SOA), in that SOAs work to integrate multiple applications that function independently to perform a service.

Why Complicate Things?

The more an app can do, the better. Customers expect more than ever of enterprise applications — they want them to perform like consumer apps do — which results in an added pressure on organizations to be agile. Microservices do just that. By dividing application functions across the architecture, developers are better able to resolve issues and make adjustments more quickly — without having to redeploy the entire application.

Just as with the architecture, the monolithic approach of application monitoring that used to work is no longer sufficient. Microservices are more granular than SOAs and introduce a variety of new monitoring challenges that require an application monitoring approach better able to manage the more sophisticated application environment.

The four main challenges microservices present to application monitoring are complexity, change, resiliency and scale. These new intricacies make it difficult for application monitoring solutions to pinpoint the source where application issues arise, monitor environments at the rate in which they change, triage alerts, and scale the large amounts of data.

Your Apps Are Your Business

Microservices provide the functionality end users are looking for in their applications and your application monitoring solutions need to keep those applications up and running – and performing as customers demand.

But, the old approach to application monitoring just isn't working. It's time to forget about the dark ages; success in the application economy starts with providing your customers with a superior application experience. Is your application performance management approach enlightened?

Matthew Dubie is a Marketing Associate at CA Technologies.

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Keep Your Application Monitoring Out of the Dark Ages

The right blend of APM and microservices can bring your organization into the enlightened age
Matthew Dubie

Let's go back in time. Think of when your applications used to run from a single server and when the monolithic enterprise management software approach was more than enough to effectively monitor them. I know those days may have been just 10 years ago, but given the fast pace of the tech industry, those are officially our dark ages.

Now, let's fast-forward to the present application economy in which your customers are demanding higher quality applications faster than ever before. To meet these new expectations, the infrastructure of the application has evolved; inevitably becoming more sophisticated and ultimately more complex.

The complexity begins with the microservices architecture, which is the way many of today's enterprise applications are built. Microservices compartmentalize the application by function. Each function within the application architecture focuses on performing a small, specific process and communicates with other functions using APIs. This differs from the traditional service-oriented architecture (SOA), in that SOAs work to integrate multiple applications that function independently to perform a service.

Why Complicate Things?

The more an app can do, the better. Customers expect more than ever of enterprise applications — they want them to perform like consumer apps do — which results in an added pressure on organizations to be agile. Microservices do just that. By dividing application functions across the architecture, developers are better able to resolve issues and make adjustments more quickly — without having to redeploy the entire application.

Just as with the architecture, the monolithic approach of application monitoring that used to work is no longer sufficient. Microservices are more granular than SOAs and introduce a variety of new monitoring challenges that require an application monitoring approach better able to manage the more sophisticated application environment.

The four main challenges microservices present to application monitoring are complexity, change, resiliency and scale. These new intricacies make it difficult for application monitoring solutions to pinpoint the source where application issues arise, monitor environments at the rate in which they change, triage alerts, and scale the large amounts of data.

Your Apps Are Your Business

Microservices provide the functionality end users are looking for in their applications and your application monitoring solutions need to keep those applications up and running – and performing as customers demand.

But, the old approach to application monitoring just isn't working. It's time to forget about the dark ages; success in the application economy starts with providing your customers with a superior application experience. Is your application performance management approach enlightened?

Matthew Dubie is a Marketing Associate at CA Technologies.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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 ...