Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2018. Part 3 covers APM and monitoring.

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

APP COMPLEXITY CHALLENGES TRADITIONAL MONITORING

The demand to put software into production fueled by Digitalization (or Digitization, or Digital Transformation), combined with the complexity, scale and rate of change in virtualized environments, cloud based environments, containers and micro-services will break monitoring as we know it.
Bernd Harzog
Founder, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, OpsDataStore

Experimentation is the mandatory 2018 New Year's resolution for any business wishing to prosper in the digital economy. As such, new development styles and container platforms supporting more rapid delivery will become the de facto application architectures. But there's a tradeoff. Dynamic distributed systems introduce unprecedented complexity that challenge traditional monitoring tools, processes and team structures. In response, successful teams will adopt modern approaches where monitoring is seen as less break-fix and more as a critical performance foundation; allowing businesses to confidently adopt and experiment with new solutions — be that containers, serverless computing, IoT … whatever comes next!
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

COVERGENCE OF APM AND INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING

As application architectures have become more distributed and heterogeneous, they are increasingly reliant on supporting infrastructure tiers: network, virtualization, storage, database, cloud, and so on. In 2018, we will see APM vendors expanding their monitoring capabilities to provide visibility of supporting IT infrastructure components. Application managers and IT teams will realize that they need contextual visibility into how an infrastructure problem affects application performance, and seek APM solutions that cross-correlate code-level and transaction-level performance with the health of the supporting physical, virtual, container and cloud infrastructures.
Vinod Mohan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, eG Innovations

eG Innovations 2018 Predictions: Greater Things Expected From APM

APP-CENTRIC IPM

Whereas infrastructure performance management (IPM) has traditionally collected data from virtual machines, servers and storage arrays, the new era of IPM will focus on the application. Since applications reside across various layers of network and storage environments, this "app-centric" version of IPM provides a different level of visibility into the performance, scalability and optimization of the infrastructure itself and the workloads that rely on it. This will also shift the focus from traditional metrics, such as infrastructure response times, to workload behavior analysis and intelligent placement.
John Gentry
CTO, Virtual Instruments

SHIFT-LEFT MONITORING

2018 will see the continued reinvention of IT Operations and refinement of DevOps practices. Rather than being an end-of-cycle and cost-centric function, leading teams will extend the notion of "shift-left" monitoring by actually developing, marketing and supporting easy to access, opt-in cloud monitoring services their colleagues and partners can use to profile the performance impacts of architecture, design and coding decisions before deployment. What will differentiate the leaders from the laggards in 2018, will be their use of modern monitoring techniques to improve in-house competitiveness and be ready to answer any questions on viability and relevance.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

CLOUD APM

According to reviews on IT Central Station, the popularity of cloud APM solutions increased throughout 2017. We expect to see this trend continue through 2018 as more companies migrate to the cloud.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Download IT Central Station's free 2018 review roundup report for APM solutions

Visibility into what's happening in the public cloud will become a mainstream requirement of IT in 2018. As infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors have been ramping up capabilities, getting actionable visibility into what's really happening beyond the enterprise's network will be in much higher demand.
Larry Zulch
President, Savvius

You can expect end-to-end performance monitoring to grow in strategic importance as companies move applications and services to hybrid cloud or multi-cloud. Maximizing business results requires understanding dependencies before, during and after migrating applications to the cloud. As complexity grows, so will the need to gain a top-down detailed picture of the IT environment to truly understand what is really happening with applications and services, both in real-time and historically. The IT organization will need pervasive visibility spanning on-premises and off-premises along with insights gained from smart data to deliver a satisfying user experience.
Ron Lifton
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout

APPLICATION DEPENDENCY MAPPING

Application dependency mapping will continue improvement, adding visibility into how external/federated application resources are being consumed, highlighting the impact on the application. Improved visualizations and "data blending" techniques will provide better context to application monitoring.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

MOBILE APM

Mobile is set to exceed 5 billion users by 2019. So as this channel becomes more and more important, monitoring the activity of users from their mobile devices, both via mobile web sites and native applications, will be increasingly crucial for the APM software market.
Boris Krasniansky
Solution Architect, Correlsense

CROWD-SOURCING

Adoption of crowd sourcing techniques will yield improved insights into common application problems, resulting in a better end product for users.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

REAL-TIME APM FOR IOT

The IoT has resulted in an exponential increase in the number of clients and in 2018 real-time monitoring will be a big issue for APM. Real-time monitoring is now essential and will be a huge challenge for APM and not just in 2018!
Antony Edwards
CTO, Testplant

There will be continued interest in how APM solutions can help proactively monitor IoT-based services and applications. But what's important is that there is clear value differentiation on what APM can bring to the table in terms of IoT monitoring. In this respect, it's not just being able to understand device errors but understanding transactions created by IoT devices/sensors, then correlating and transforming this data into business information e.g. not just that a device is having an issue but who is the customer/user and how important are they to the company.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

APM FOR BLOCKCHAIN

With the explosion of Bitcoin and the massive grown of cryptocurrency smart contracts, 2018 may well be entering the global adoption phase of blockchain technology, just as 1993 was for email. As businesses everywhere begin to stake a claim, this gold rush will lead to blockchain related performance bottlenecks, and APM solutions will need to begin monitoring blockchain synchronization and peer-to-peer performance, along with smart contract execution and transaction rates. Because these decentralized blockchain smart contracts will integrate directly into the web and mobile order processing, APM leaders will be in a race to offer such instrumentation, visibility, and performance analysis, as part of their complete "end to end" performance monitoring solutions.
Matt Hintze
CEO, HITS Inc

Read 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4, covering the end-user experience.