20 Technologies to Support APM - Part 2

APMdigest continues the list, cataloging the many valuable tools available – beyond what is technically categorized as Application Performance Management (APM) – to support the goals of improving application performance and business service.

Start with Part 1

6. Synthetic Monitoring

Understanding Web and mobile app performance starts with the end-user experience, no matter how and when a customer accesses the application. And while today's IT departments are facing enormous pressure to deliver a flawless end-user experience, they must also drive down costs. These competing forces create a compelling case for adding a synthetic-transaction SaaS solution to the APM mix. IT pros responsible for application performance can understand the health and availability of key applications, and track global and local end-user experience, with a cost-effective, easy-to-use and fast-to-implement solution.
Aruna Ravichandran
VP Product and Solution Marketing, APM and DevOps, CA Technologies

Active, or synthetic, monitoring of applications, services, and websites 24/7 is an essential component of an enterprise-wide APM strategy. It ensures that online properties are fast and reliable for end users, helping to protect brand image and drive revenue. While passive monitoring provides a view into end user experience, it cannot detect downtime or get a full picture of what end users see outside of your datacenter(s) or cloud.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

7. Infrastructure Monitoring

While APM solutions and corresponding strategy is critical for modern enterprises it's essential to also adopt an appropriate infrastructure monitoring solution. Applications sit on top of increasingly complex infrastructure workloads (server, network, storage) brought about by innovations in areas cloud architecture, mobile and non-relational data stores. This means that a unified infrastructure monitoring solution that is able to cover these areas is an essential component of a strategic monitoring strategy.
John Rakowski
Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Forrester Research

While APM provides great insight into service delivery from a user perspective, it alone isn't sufficient to properly identify and resolve performance or availability issues pertaining to the back-end infrastructure. Service-centric unified monitoring tools are the key to ensuring the health of applications and all the infrastructure components needed for consistent and reliable delivery of the service.
Deepak Kanwar
Senior Manager, Zenoss

8. Load Testing

APM is a cornerstone of delivering a quality user experience. To supplement the 360 degree view of your APM solution it is important to also implement and obtain correlation between your APM and Load Testing solutions. This combination provides a clear perspective of your application and your application environment, allowing you to use load to help predict application performance prior to seeing real life behavior through your APM solution.
Denis Goodwin
Director of Product Management, AlertSite by SmartBear

Among the thousands of product reviews by real users on IT Central Station – aka the "Yelp for IT" – we find numerous cross-references between APM and testing tools. Our community of IT professionals evidently find that investment in testing tools is complimentary to APM.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

9. Log Management

While APM tools are definitely widely used for a view into how your own application code is performing, in many cases APM alone is not enough to give an end-to-end perspective of your system - especially in cloud environments where you no longer have the same level of access and it can be more difficult to apply instrumentation. We are seeing a huge increase in users sending more and more performance metrics into their log data – giving them the ability to use "logs as data" along side their APM tools, and providing deeper log-level insights into key business metrics.
Trevor Parsons, Phd
Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Logentries

Combining unified monitoring with log analysis provides faster trouble-shooting, improved root cause analysis, and more effective IT event correlation and forensic analysis.
David Dennis
VP of Marketing & Business Development, GroundWork

10. Middleware Management

Middleware Infrastructure Visibility is a necessity for application and business service performance. Enterprise applications are inherently complex and built on a combination of technologies including middleware systems (e.g., WebSphere MQ, IBM Data Power, TIBCO, and Oracle BPEL), packaged applications, and other legacy technologies. Middleware, in particular, serves as the plumbing connecting a multitude of heterogeneous systems. In this way, middleware management complements traditional APM offerings because it provides deep visibility into the infrastructure these applications depend on to deliver data and business services.
April Hickel
Product Manager, APM, BMC Software

20 Technologies to Support APM - Part 3

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

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 ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

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 ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

20 Technologies to Support APM - Part 2

APMdigest continues the list, cataloging the many valuable tools available – beyond what is technically categorized as Application Performance Management (APM) – to support the goals of improving application performance and business service.

Start with Part 1

6. Synthetic Monitoring

Understanding Web and mobile app performance starts with the end-user experience, no matter how and when a customer accesses the application. And while today's IT departments are facing enormous pressure to deliver a flawless end-user experience, they must also drive down costs. These competing forces create a compelling case for adding a synthetic-transaction SaaS solution to the APM mix. IT pros responsible for application performance can understand the health and availability of key applications, and track global and local end-user experience, with a cost-effective, easy-to-use and fast-to-implement solution.
Aruna Ravichandran
VP Product and Solution Marketing, APM and DevOps, CA Technologies

Active, or synthetic, monitoring of applications, services, and websites 24/7 is an essential component of an enterprise-wide APM strategy. It ensures that online properties are fast and reliable for end users, helping to protect brand image and drive revenue. While passive monitoring provides a view into end user experience, it cannot detect downtime or get a full picture of what end users see outside of your datacenter(s) or cloud.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

7. Infrastructure Monitoring

While APM solutions and corresponding strategy is critical for modern enterprises it's essential to also adopt an appropriate infrastructure monitoring solution. Applications sit on top of increasingly complex infrastructure workloads (server, network, storage) brought about by innovations in areas cloud architecture, mobile and non-relational data stores. This means that a unified infrastructure monitoring solution that is able to cover these areas is an essential component of a strategic monitoring strategy.
John Rakowski
Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Forrester Research

While APM provides great insight into service delivery from a user perspective, it alone isn't sufficient to properly identify and resolve performance or availability issues pertaining to the back-end infrastructure. Service-centric unified monitoring tools are the key to ensuring the health of applications and all the infrastructure components needed for consistent and reliable delivery of the service.
Deepak Kanwar
Senior Manager, Zenoss

8. Load Testing

APM is a cornerstone of delivering a quality user experience. To supplement the 360 degree view of your APM solution it is important to also implement and obtain correlation between your APM and Load Testing solutions. This combination provides a clear perspective of your application and your application environment, allowing you to use load to help predict application performance prior to seeing real life behavior through your APM solution.
Denis Goodwin
Director of Product Management, AlertSite by SmartBear

Among the thousands of product reviews by real users on IT Central Station – aka the "Yelp for IT" – we find numerous cross-references between APM and testing tools. Our community of IT professionals evidently find that investment in testing tools is complimentary to APM.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

9. Log Management

While APM tools are definitely widely used for a view into how your own application code is performing, in many cases APM alone is not enough to give an end-to-end perspective of your system - especially in cloud environments where you no longer have the same level of access and it can be more difficult to apply instrumentation. We are seeing a huge increase in users sending more and more performance metrics into their log data – giving them the ability to use "logs as data" along side their APM tools, and providing deeper log-level insights into key business metrics.
Trevor Parsons, Phd
Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Logentries

Combining unified monitoring with log analysis provides faster trouble-shooting, improved root cause analysis, and more effective IT event correlation and forensic analysis.
David Dennis
VP of Marketing & Business Development, GroundWork

10. Middleware Management

Middleware Infrastructure Visibility is a necessity for application and business service performance. Enterprise applications are inherently complex and built on a combination of technologies including middleware systems (e.g., WebSphere MQ, IBM Data Power, TIBCO, and Oracle BPEL), packaged applications, and other legacy technologies. Middleware, in particular, serves as the plumbing connecting a multitude of heterogeneous systems. In this way, middleware management complements traditional APM offerings because it provides deep visibility into the infrastructure these applications depend on to deliver data and business services.
April Hickel
Product Manager, APM, BMC Software

20 Technologies to Support APM - Part 3

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

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 ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

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 ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ...