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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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Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

 

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ... 

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

Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

 

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ...