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Making Sense of APM and Ending the Agent/Agentless War

Antonio Piraino

Application Performance Management (APM) is a hot topic right now. Gartner defines APM as agent-based monitoring that sits inside the operating system and provides code-level performance, tracing, application mapping, and tracking. How exactly does APM help an organization, and when would a business choose to invest in this technology? When does APM make sense and when doesn’t it? And, more broadly, how does this tie into the changing needs of IT monitoring? Finally, why does the agent vs. agentless debate continue to rage on?

Simply put, enterprises that write their own code (Java, .NET, etc.) and leverage applications unique to the way they do business must have code-level application visibility. More specifically, those companies who place high importance on understanding how code executes and functions in a production environment, and what that means to business-critical, revenue generating, bespoke applications need APM.

That said, APM is not necessary for the vast majority of commercial applications not authored by the enterprise because code-level visibility is not necessary, for instance in the example of a CAD app purchased from a provider of an ERP solution. There is also the cost consideration. As a single APM agent typically runs somewhere between $150-$200 per month, from a cost perspective it simply doesn’t make sense. If your authentication service goes down, you’re not going to use an APM agent on that. In fact, most of your operators wouldn’t even know what to do with the deep code level data you’re getting back.

Today we’re seeing traditional IT infrastructure management vendors moving towards an application-centric view of the world and APM vendors attempting to get broader visibility of the entire IT infrastructure. As an enterprise, I need to understand how all of my infrastructure is working — what’s up, what’s down, what’s running well and what’s not, capacity planning, failure analysis, and keeping the lights on across my vast complicated set of IT technologies. Simultaneously, organizations need to know how their applications are doing. However, rather than handpicking one or two “important” ones for code level visibility, you’d really like the two different types of vendors to meet in the middle.

So most organizations are combining application-aware infrastructure monitoring for all apps and augmenting in spot places with APM for custom apps.

On to the war — agent-based versus agentless monitoring. For years now we’ve heard sniping back and forth as to which model is best suited for enterprise IT. Both approaches have their pros and cons. Agents can provide more granular performance metrics, while agentless monitoring platforms are often easier to manage. But to say you can only have one or the other is a canard. There are vendors that provide customers with the option to deploy both models simultaneously, depending on the customer’s need.

If there is one inalienable truth concerning IT, it’s that IT has and always will be heterogeneous in nature. The complexity of systems and IT infrastructure ecosystems demand it and IT will never converge on homogeneity. Enterprise IT should not look to choose between APM and application-aware infrastructure monitoring. Nor should they be forced to adopt a single approach to gathering performance metrics. That of course isn’t stopping vendors from yelling from the rooftops.

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Making Sense of APM and Ending the Agent/Agentless War

Antonio Piraino

Application Performance Management (APM) is a hot topic right now. Gartner defines APM as agent-based monitoring that sits inside the operating system and provides code-level performance, tracing, application mapping, and tracking. How exactly does APM help an organization, and when would a business choose to invest in this technology? When does APM make sense and when doesn’t it? And, more broadly, how does this tie into the changing needs of IT monitoring? Finally, why does the agent vs. agentless debate continue to rage on?

Simply put, enterprises that write their own code (Java, .NET, etc.) and leverage applications unique to the way they do business must have code-level application visibility. More specifically, those companies who place high importance on understanding how code executes and functions in a production environment, and what that means to business-critical, revenue generating, bespoke applications need APM.

That said, APM is not necessary for the vast majority of commercial applications not authored by the enterprise because code-level visibility is not necessary, for instance in the example of a CAD app purchased from a provider of an ERP solution. There is also the cost consideration. As a single APM agent typically runs somewhere between $150-$200 per month, from a cost perspective it simply doesn’t make sense. If your authentication service goes down, you’re not going to use an APM agent on that. In fact, most of your operators wouldn’t even know what to do with the deep code level data you’re getting back.

Today we’re seeing traditional IT infrastructure management vendors moving towards an application-centric view of the world and APM vendors attempting to get broader visibility of the entire IT infrastructure. As an enterprise, I need to understand how all of my infrastructure is working — what’s up, what’s down, what’s running well and what’s not, capacity planning, failure analysis, and keeping the lights on across my vast complicated set of IT technologies. Simultaneously, organizations need to know how their applications are doing. However, rather than handpicking one or two “important” ones for code level visibility, you’d really like the two different types of vendors to meet in the middle.

So most organizations are combining application-aware infrastructure monitoring for all apps and augmenting in spot places with APM for custom apps.

On to the war — agent-based versus agentless monitoring. For years now we’ve heard sniping back and forth as to which model is best suited for enterprise IT. Both approaches have their pros and cons. Agents can provide more granular performance metrics, while agentless monitoring platforms are often easier to manage. But to say you can only have one or the other is a canard. There are vendors that provide customers with the option to deploy both models simultaneously, depending on the customer’s need.

If there is one inalienable truth concerning IT, it’s that IT has and always will be heterogeneous in nature. The complexity of systems and IT infrastructure ecosystems demand it and IT will never converge on homogeneity. Enterprise IT should not look to choose between APM and application-aware infrastructure monitoring. Nor should they be forced to adopt a single approach to gathering performance metrics. That of course isn’t stopping vendors from yelling from the rooftops.

APM

The Latest

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...