Q&A Part One: Ovum Talks About APM

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

In APMdigest's exclusive interview, Michael Azoff, Principal Analyst at Ovum, talks about his APM Solution Guide 2012, the APM market, and the definition of APM.

APM: How did Ovum's APM Solution Guide come about?

MA: The first time that I wrote about Application Performance Management (APM) was in 2004. The next time I looked at the space was 2008. Now this report is in 2012. So it looks like I'm writing these every four years.

For this report, I was being approached by various vendors, some of them new to the market, and I was very intrigued because they were telling me they were doing all these new things.

At the same time felt that the term APM was very broadly used. There were all these different vendors, they all have different histories, they all have a different take on what APM means and what they offer. So I thought that we really need to get clarification. That was the spark for the report.

Although the Solution Guide does not tend to be exhaustive, I think it is very representative of the leading players in the market. It provides a short analysis of the vendors, and the Ovum APM Rainbow Map which is chart where you can see the features at a glance. It is an opportunity to see what is really happening in APM.

APM: How did you conduct the research?

MA: Mostly talking to the vendors. I had a briefing with each vendor, and I also created a features matrix. The features matrix is a spreadsheet with about 200 rows that we ask vendors to complete. That information is what underlies the Ovum APM Rainbow Map.

APM: What are the most interesting changes you have seen in the current APM market?

MA: I think what we are seeing is that the new infrastructure that is coming out – the Cloud, virtualization – is pushing the envelope for what APM needs to offer. You've also got innovators providing business transaction management, for example. You've got innovation in end-to-end monitoring across a whole range of different edge devices. So I think the industry is very healthy in terms of the innovation that is coming out of it. Some vendors are obviously ahead of others, and I think that is brought out in the report.

APM: Did your research help you come to terms with the definition of APM?

MA: I think APM is still confusing, as a term, because it covers so much. I think end users really need to understand exactly how each vendor is actually using that term, in what it is covering. I think the Solution Guide helps in that respect.

APM: It is interesting that you mention how broad the term APM is, because I see that you include cyber security as an APM capability, and normally I view that as separate from APM. How do you see that fitting in?

MA: Yes, I got a comment from a Gartner analyst querying that. That is an example of where I, as an analyst, am sticking my neck out and saying what the market should be. And the market carries on blithely regardless of my view.

The fact of the matter is that if you look at application development logically, security should be something that developers think about right from the start. I think this is more important today because we are having more applications running outside the firewall. So there is a real need to address these issues.

I don't see a logical separation between security and the rest of application development. I think that application developers should be trained to be aware of security issues, and I think that would make it safer for the end-users. We have profiled this approach in a number of reports in our research. My bringing security into the broader definition of APM is part of that approach, creating awareness. Whether the market embraces that or not is another matter.

APM: Another capability that you included in APM, which I agree with, is network performance management. Explain how you see NPM in relation to APM.

MA: Yes, absolutely. Historically, going back to 2004 and 2008 when I was reviewing the market, the vendors were coming from different traditions, and they were quite separate products. From an end-user point of view, these types of historical divisions don't make any logical sense. They want an application to work, and if there are issues affecting the performance deriving from infrastructure, the information needs to be brought out. So I argued for integrating applications and network right from the early days.

What I think is interesting to see today, is that we are getting nearer to that point. There is greater recognition of the need to have that type of approach. We are seeing vendors embrace that. We are getting nearer to that optimal point where these kinds of historical divisions are not going to affect what kind of product is offered.

We are seeing this crossover between traditional network performance tools that are actually providing a lot of information about applications. So I think we are getting to some interesting crossroads. I take a very broad approach and I think we are seeing that trend in the market.

Click here to read Q&A Part Two: Ovum Talks About APM

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Q&A Part One: Ovum Talks About APM

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

In APMdigest's exclusive interview, Michael Azoff, Principal Analyst at Ovum, talks about his APM Solution Guide 2012, the APM market, and the definition of APM.

APM: How did Ovum's APM Solution Guide come about?

MA: The first time that I wrote about Application Performance Management (APM) was in 2004. The next time I looked at the space was 2008. Now this report is in 2012. So it looks like I'm writing these every four years.

For this report, I was being approached by various vendors, some of them new to the market, and I was very intrigued because they were telling me they were doing all these new things.

At the same time felt that the term APM was very broadly used. There were all these different vendors, they all have different histories, they all have a different take on what APM means and what they offer. So I thought that we really need to get clarification. That was the spark for the report.

Although the Solution Guide does not tend to be exhaustive, I think it is very representative of the leading players in the market. It provides a short analysis of the vendors, and the Ovum APM Rainbow Map which is chart where you can see the features at a glance. It is an opportunity to see what is really happening in APM.

APM: How did you conduct the research?

MA: Mostly talking to the vendors. I had a briefing with each vendor, and I also created a features matrix. The features matrix is a spreadsheet with about 200 rows that we ask vendors to complete. That information is what underlies the Ovum APM Rainbow Map.

APM: What are the most interesting changes you have seen in the current APM market?

MA: I think what we are seeing is that the new infrastructure that is coming out – the Cloud, virtualization – is pushing the envelope for what APM needs to offer. You've also got innovators providing business transaction management, for example. You've got innovation in end-to-end monitoring across a whole range of different edge devices. So I think the industry is very healthy in terms of the innovation that is coming out of it. Some vendors are obviously ahead of others, and I think that is brought out in the report.

APM: Did your research help you come to terms with the definition of APM?

MA: I think APM is still confusing, as a term, because it covers so much. I think end users really need to understand exactly how each vendor is actually using that term, in what it is covering. I think the Solution Guide helps in that respect.

APM: It is interesting that you mention how broad the term APM is, because I see that you include cyber security as an APM capability, and normally I view that as separate from APM. How do you see that fitting in?

MA: Yes, I got a comment from a Gartner analyst querying that. That is an example of where I, as an analyst, am sticking my neck out and saying what the market should be. And the market carries on blithely regardless of my view.

The fact of the matter is that if you look at application development logically, security should be something that developers think about right from the start. I think this is more important today because we are having more applications running outside the firewall. So there is a real need to address these issues.

I don't see a logical separation between security and the rest of application development. I think that application developers should be trained to be aware of security issues, and I think that would make it safer for the end-users. We have profiled this approach in a number of reports in our research. My bringing security into the broader definition of APM is part of that approach, creating awareness. Whether the market embraces that or not is another matter.

APM: Another capability that you included in APM, which I agree with, is network performance management. Explain how you see NPM in relation to APM.

MA: Yes, absolutely. Historically, going back to 2004 and 2008 when I was reviewing the market, the vendors were coming from different traditions, and they were quite separate products. From an end-user point of view, these types of historical divisions don't make any logical sense. They want an application to work, and if there are issues affecting the performance deriving from infrastructure, the information needs to be brought out. So I argued for integrating applications and network right from the early days.

What I think is interesting to see today, is that we are getting nearer to that point. There is greater recognition of the need to have that type of approach. We are seeing vendors embrace that. We are getting nearer to that optimal point where these kinds of historical divisions are not going to affect what kind of product is offered.

We are seeing this crossover between traditional network performance tools that are actually providing a lot of information about applications. So I think we are getting to some interesting crossroads. I take a very broad approach and I think we are seeing that trend in the market.

Click here to read Q&A Part Two: Ovum Talks About APM

Hot Topic
The Latest
The Latest 10

The Latest

Three Strikes and They're Gone: Why Proactive Operations is Now a Customer Retention Strategy

IT organizations have historically measured success by how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong. The entire discipline of Incident Management has been optimized around mean time to resolution, first-response SLAs and ticket closure rates. But new research suggests that even though this is a well-executed playbook, it's no longer enough to retain customers ...

When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

From Cleanup to Prevention: The Future of Cloud-Native Cost Optimization

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

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Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

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The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...