Skip to main content

Looking Back at 2018 APM Predictions - Did They Come True? Part 2

Jonah Kowall

I would like to highlight some of the predictions made at the start of 2018, and how those have panned out, or not actually occurred. I will review some of the predictions and trends from APMdigest's 2018 APM Predictions.

Here is Part 2:

Start with Looking Back at 2018 APM Predictions - Did They Come True? Part 1

Microtrends

The use of chatbots and other connected assistants have not yielded any benefits in the IT Operations space in 2018, but there are many emerging startups in this area looking to change that over the coming years. While several companies such as ServiceNow and Microsoft made acquisitions in this market, they haven’t produced anything tangible, especially not in 2018. Time will tell if these are a passing fad or they become a cornerstone of computing.

IoT is still nascent, especially in the APM market. The predictions about its growing importance and adoption of APM for IoT are still generally immature and early stage. There are some incredible stories for those doing this, but it’s still a very small number today. Those predictions around IoT are likely too early.

Similarly, Blockchain doesn’t even go there, way too early considering how few real implementations of Blockchain are implemented in production at this point. Maybe in another five years, we can begin to make some predictions, but it will likely be longer before Blockchain performance management solutions are needed by the market.

Culture and Communication

The biggest barrier to transformation is culture and people. This has been clear from every major CIO survey conducted in the last 10 years of economic growth in this bull market. Our communications and the way we do incident response have evolved significantly. The players in this space are solving an extremely important problem, one which MAY change the culture of an organization. This trend will continue as these technologies become essential to better communication of increasingly distributed workforces.

The codification of the role of the SRE by the excellent second book from Google has helped the industry understand how to apply DevOps in an even more concrete manner. The predictions about SRE were spot on, as SRE has become the gold standard for managing and operating applications. Still early for most organizations, but now on the radar. There were several predictions about SRE for the past year. I would, however, say that the vendors who predicted DevOps and culture change by a tool were sadly far from reality. Tools don’t change cultures, but cultural changes often require tool changes.

Wrapping up a great 2018, I wish everyone a productive and creative 2019 where we can listen, learn, innovate, share, and advance our group of APM vendors and practitioners. There are many problems to solve, and new approaches being invented daily by this amazing community.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

Looking Back at 2018 APM Predictions - Did They Come True? Part 2

Jonah Kowall

I would like to highlight some of the predictions made at the start of 2018, and how those have panned out, or not actually occurred. I will review some of the predictions and trends from APMdigest's 2018 APM Predictions.

Here is Part 2:

Start with Looking Back at 2018 APM Predictions - Did They Come True? Part 1

Microtrends

The use of chatbots and other connected assistants have not yielded any benefits in the IT Operations space in 2018, but there are many emerging startups in this area looking to change that over the coming years. While several companies such as ServiceNow and Microsoft made acquisitions in this market, they haven’t produced anything tangible, especially not in 2018. Time will tell if these are a passing fad or they become a cornerstone of computing.

IoT is still nascent, especially in the APM market. The predictions about its growing importance and adoption of APM for IoT are still generally immature and early stage. There are some incredible stories for those doing this, but it’s still a very small number today. Those predictions around IoT are likely too early.

Similarly, Blockchain doesn’t even go there, way too early considering how few real implementations of Blockchain are implemented in production at this point. Maybe in another five years, we can begin to make some predictions, but it will likely be longer before Blockchain performance management solutions are needed by the market.

Culture and Communication

The biggest barrier to transformation is culture and people. This has been clear from every major CIO survey conducted in the last 10 years of economic growth in this bull market. Our communications and the way we do incident response have evolved significantly. The players in this space are solving an extremely important problem, one which MAY change the culture of an organization. This trend will continue as these technologies become essential to better communication of increasingly distributed workforces.

The codification of the role of the SRE by the excellent second book from Google has helped the industry understand how to apply DevOps in an even more concrete manner. The predictions about SRE were spot on, as SRE has become the gold standard for managing and operating applications. Still early for most organizations, but now on the radar. There were several predictions about SRE for the past year. I would, however, say that the vendors who predicted DevOps and culture change by a tool were sadly far from reality. Tools don’t change cultures, but cultural changes often require tool changes.

Wrapping up a great 2018, I wish everyone a productive and creative 2019 where we can listen, learn, innovate, share, and advance our group of APM vendors and practitioners. There are many problems to solve, and new approaches being invented daily by this amazing community.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...