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The App Hugger's Brief History of Application Recovery - Part II: The APM Era

Kevin McCartney

This is Part II of our recounting of the most common approaches to application recovery since the mid-1990s, along with an overview of the limitations we’ve run across most frequently.

Start with Part I

2009 – Present

APM is Born (“I See the Problem. Now What?”)

WHAT APM DOES:

• From end-user perspective
• Deep monitoring at code level
• More data by which to pinpoint application problems

LIMITATIONS: First generation Application Performance Management (APM) solutions tend to be application-specific and/or platform-specific, so they don’t reflect the typical enterprise—which is very heterogeneous.

In addition, the amounts of data generated by APM software can be overwhelming, coming from so many sources, requiring significant analytics to identify the root cause. This makes APM tools challenging as an operational tool in a run-time environment. Finally, once APM software identifies the problem, it doesn’t give you the tools you need to fix the problem.

2013 – Present

Push-Button Application Recovery (“Welcome to the Application Age”)

WHAT IT DOES:

• Application- and platform-agnostic
• Stateful awareness
• Automatically execute pre-determined steps based on business rules

FEATURES:

• Stateful awareness of the application
• Understanding of the application’s architecture, its components, and related dependencies
• A unique design leveraging the application process component layer
• Secure, policy-driven action

What Do Next Gen Application Management Platforms Look Like?

Next generation Application Management platforms are emerging that address the realistic problems faced by today’s enterprises, which are:

(a) increasingly application-centric (as opposed to hardware- and network-focused)

(b) utilize hundreds of diverse apps and systems

(c) run in heterogeneous environments

Push-Button Application Recovery — enabled by stateful awareness of each application and by leveraging the Application Process Component layer, which is common across all applications — and other new Application Management features have the potential to dramatically speed recovery time and significantly reduce the resources required to recover an application.

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Azul

The App Hugger's Brief History of Application Recovery - Part II: The APM Era

Kevin McCartney

This is Part II of our recounting of the most common approaches to application recovery since the mid-1990s, along with an overview of the limitations we’ve run across most frequently.

Start with Part I

2009 – Present

APM is Born (“I See the Problem. Now What?”)

WHAT APM DOES:

• From end-user perspective
• Deep monitoring at code level
• More data by which to pinpoint application problems

LIMITATIONS: First generation Application Performance Management (APM) solutions tend to be application-specific and/or platform-specific, so they don’t reflect the typical enterprise—which is very heterogeneous.

In addition, the amounts of data generated by APM software can be overwhelming, coming from so many sources, requiring significant analytics to identify the root cause. This makes APM tools challenging as an operational tool in a run-time environment. Finally, once APM software identifies the problem, it doesn’t give you the tools you need to fix the problem.

2013 – Present

Push-Button Application Recovery (“Welcome to the Application Age”)

WHAT IT DOES:

• Application- and platform-agnostic
• Stateful awareness
• Automatically execute pre-determined steps based on business rules

FEATURES:

• Stateful awareness of the application
• Understanding of the application’s architecture, its components, and related dependencies
• A unique design leveraging the application process component layer
• Secure, policy-driven action

What Do Next Gen Application Management Platforms Look Like?

Next generation Application Management platforms are emerging that address the realistic problems faced by today’s enterprises, which are:

(a) increasingly application-centric (as opposed to hardware- and network-focused)

(b) utilize hundreds of diverse apps and systems

(c) run in heterogeneous environments

Push-Button Application Recovery — enabled by stateful awareness of each application and by leveraging the Application Process Component layer, which is common across all applications — and other new Application Management features have the potential to dramatically speed recovery time and significantly reduce the resources required to recover an application.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

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Azul