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5 Top Findings from TRAC Research's APM Spectrum

The following are five interesting findings from TRAC Research's APM Spectrum report, based on more than 400 survey participants and more than 120 live interviews:

1. Differences in the value of APM capabilities for specific job roles

Research example: IT operations roles are nearly four times less likely to be interested in deploying application instrumentation techniques. The study includes sections that cover the need for APM solutions for IT operations, application developers/QA, CIO and business users.

2. It is not about selecting the best solution, it is about the right mix of products that can close all visibility gaps

Research example: 71% of user organizations are using more than 1 tool for APM. The study includes nine APM submarkets that include between 8 and 23 technology vendors based on their ability to support specific use cases and job roles, and very often using a mix of different underlining technologies to address different aspects of application performance monitoring.

3. Beyond features and functionalities

Research example: CIOs reported that 72% of IT budgets is being spent on operating and maintaining existing IT services. Most of the purchases are driven, not by features and functionalities, but by the ability to solve real business problems. These problems range from reducing the amount of IT resources allocated to firefighting and troubleshooting problems to ensure that performance issues do not cause revenue loss.

4. Supporting different IT initiatives

Research example: 49% of organizations reported that lack of SLAs for user experience is the key challenge for managing application performance in the cloud. Organizations are reporting that their APM capabilities are often defined based on IT initiatives that they are looking to support, such as virtualization, cloud, SaaS, Big Data, Web Services, or mobility.

5. Capabilities relevant for different industry sectors

Research example: Organizations in the Finance sector are 59% less likely to deploy, or are interested in deploying, APM solutions that are delivered as SaaS. When it comes to specific APM capabilities, the research shows major differences across organizations from different industry sectors.

ABOUT Bojan Simic

Bojan Simic is President and Principal Analyst at TRAC Research, a market research and analyst firm that specializes in IT performance management. As an industry analyst, Simic has interviewed more than 2,000 IT and business professionals from end-user organizations and has published more than 50 research reports. His domain knowledge includes insights into end user experiences, best-practices in deploying solutions for IT performance management, and strategies of related solution providers.

Prior to joining TRAC Research, Simic was a lead analyst for Network and Application Performance Management research at Aberdeen Group. He is frequently quoted in leading industry publications and has presented his research findings at more than 30 market facing events.

Simic's coverage area at TRAC Research includes application and network monitoring, WAN management and acceleration, cloud and virtualization management, business service management and managed services.

Bojan holds a BA in Economics from Belgrade University in Belgrade, Serbia and an MBA from McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley University.

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5 Top Findings from TRAC Research's APM Spectrum

The following are five interesting findings from TRAC Research's APM Spectrum report, based on more than 400 survey participants and more than 120 live interviews:

1. Differences in the value of APM capabilities for specific job roles

Research example: IT operations roles are nearly four times less likely to be interested in deploying application instrumentation techniques. The study includes sections that cover the need for APM solutions for IT operations, application developers/QA, CIO and business users.

2. It is not about selecting the best solution, it is about the right mix of products that can close all visibility gaps

Research example: 71% of user organizations are using more than 1 tool for APM. The study includes nine APM submarkets that include between 8 and 23 technology vendors based on their ability to support specific use cases and job roles, and very often using a mix of different underlining technologies to address different aspects of application performance monitoring.

3. Beyond features and functionalities

Research example: CIOs reported that 72% of IT budgets is being spent on operating and maintaining existing IT services. Most of the purchases are driven, not by features and functionalities, but by the ability to solve real business problems. These problems range from reducing the amount of IT resources allocated to firefighting and troubleshooting problems to ensure that performance issues do not cause revenue loss.

4. Supporting different IT initiatives

Research example: 49% of organizations reported that lack of SLAs for user experience is the key challenge for managing application performance in the cloud. Organizations are reporting that their APM capabilities are often defined based on IT initiatives that they are looking to support, such as virtualization, cloud, SaaS, Big Data, Web Services, or mobility.

5. Capabilities relevant for different industry sectors

Research example: Organizations in the Finance sector are 59% less likely to deploy, or are interested in deploying, APM solutions that are delivered as SaaS. When it comes to specific APM capabilities, the research shows major differences across organizations from different industry sectors.

ABOUT Bojan Simic

Bojan Simic is President and Principal Analyst at TRAC Research, a market research and analyst firm that specializes in IT performance management. As an industry analyst, Simic has interviewed more than 2,000 IT and business professionals from end-user organizations and has published more than 50 research reports. His domain knowledge includes insights into end user experiences, best-practices in deploying solutions for IT performance management, and strategies of related solution providers.

Prior to joining TRAC Research, Simic was a lead analyst for Network and Application Performance Management research at Aberdeen Group. He is frequently quoted in leading industry publications and has presented his research findings at more than 30 market facing events.

Simic's coverage area at TRAC Research includes application and network monitoring, WAN management and acceleration, cloud and virtualization management, business service management and managed services.

Bojan holds a BA in Economics from Belgrade University in Belgrade, Serbia and an MBA from McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley University.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...