APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management predictions features industry experts – from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors – offering thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how APM will evolve and impact business in 2015. The final installment, Part 3 is all about all about cloud, virtualization and DevOps. Plus a bonus vertical prediction at the end.

Thanks to all the experts for your wide range of excellent predictions. According to your collective forecast, it seems that 2015 is going to be an exciting year for APM.

Start with Part 1 of "15 APM Predictions for 2015"

Start with Part 2 of "15 APM Predictions for 2015"

11. APM PROVIDES UNIVERSAL CLOUD COVERAGE

In 2015, focus on cloud monitoring will continue to rise.
Karun Subramanian
Application Support Expert, www.karunsubramanian.com

For all of the talk about cloud diversity, the majority of the users in the market have been slow to adopt a cloud diverse development practice. The juggernaut cloud provider is still obviously AWS, as they reportedly hold 17 times the market share of their next 5 competitors put together. And when we talk to our users, their applications in the cloud are primarily running on AWS. In 2015 we should see true cloud diversity take hold, forcing many APM providers, who have prioritized AWS in development, to get on board with universal coverage for cloud providers. Those who have taken a “cloud-first” approach to developing their APM solution will find this transition much easier than those who have to re-engineer or cobble together a mixture of legacy and next-gen solutions that can span multiple physical and virtual environments.
Josh Stephens
VP of Product Strategy, Idera

In 2015, we expect APM will increasingly be focused on cloud performance management (CPM), as applications become decoupled, and components are distributed across public, private and hybrid could environments. Increased visibility into log-level analytics will be critical to APM as access to code and application metrics becomes increasingly untenable.
Andrew Burton
CEO, Logentries

In 2015, APM will expand to cover the growing ecosystem of SaaS applications that increasingly power modern organizations. Traditional APM has covered apps such as web apps and on-premise data stores, but as businesses continue to move to the cloud, APM will have to cover the intersection of applications built by the business and applications bought by the business. Distributed applications communicating with each other is increasingly the fabric of modern businesses, and 2015 is the year that APM steps up to monitoring the entire ecosystem.
Dan Kuebrich
Product Director, Application Performance, AppNeta

There are a lot of apps being developed and hosted in the cloud, and those “producers” need to monitor and manage their own app performance, but what about the customers – the enterprise IT and business operations teams purchasing and consuming these cloud apps and services; e.g., Office365, Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Workday, DropBox, Expensify, etc.? There are a lot more of these SaaS app “consumers” than there are “producers” – and these consumers still own application performance management and still support users who expect them to maintain high application service levels regardless of where the app runs. It’s still Application Performance Management, but the requirements are fundamentally different and it’s this emerging need that will disrupt and reshape the APM landscape the most in 2015.
Patrick Carey
VP Product Management and Marketing, Exoprise

Patrick Carey Article: APM - at a Crossroad in the Cloud

12. APM FACES NEW VIRTUALIZATION CHALLENGES

In 2015, the migration to 10G networks and the increasing adoption of virtualization will intensify the pressure on APM vendors. The massive amount of data to be analyzed will challenge the industry to combine deep transaction analysis with full details retention at L7 over millions of transactions. In addition, vendors not in a position to monitor transactions over virtual networks will be out the game.
Boris ROGIER
Managing Director, SecurActive Performance Vision

2015 will see the need for Application Performance Management and Application Aware-NPM (AA-NPM) production tools to comprehend two new domains: what is going on inside virtualized servers (virtual machines [VMs] and virtual switches); and visualizing virtual networks, especially around OpenStack. Both of these technologies can have a large impact on production application performance and quality of service. By providing visibility between configuration changes in virtual servers and virtual networks with application performance changes, AA-NPM production tools will simplify the IT staff’s job understanding both unexpected events, as well as seeing if changes in the underlying infrastructure produced the results that were expected.
Mike Heumann
VP, Product Marketing and Alliances, Emulex

Mike Heumann Blog: In Hyperscale Environments Network Visibility Remains Vital

Seismic shifts are taking place in the enterprise, and those shifts mean that application and infrastructure performance management (IPM) must adapt to new realities. There’s no stopping the rampant adoption of mobility, cloud and hybrid cloud computing. The growth in virtualization of compute, storage and networking remains unfettered. And, adoption of web-scale computing is burgeoning and so is the DevOps organization. All of this means that the sophistication of performance management tools must evolve at hyper-speed. To keep pace, those tools will also have to be highly scalable. They must extend end-to-end, from the user to the backend infrastructure to include clients, servers, network and storage, as well as support virtualized workloads of all kinds, wherever they reside whether web, e-commerce or other business apps. Yes, that’s a tall order – but, not optional. The APM solutions of 2015 must become infrastructure-aware and the virtualization/IPM solutions must become application-aware!
S. “Sundi” Sundaresh
CEO, Xangati

13. APM ADAPTS TO CONTAINERIZATION AND SDN

In the next year, we’ll see companies spend more time and money looking at how they can optimize application performance from the ground up utilizing containerization technology, such as Docker. This trend will be evident across many application and technology types — from web applications to big data analysis engines.
Charlie Key
Founder of Modulus, a Progress company

As Docker continues to gain momentum in organizations adopting DevOps and cloud computing, APM will focus more on container-driven, microservices architectures in 2015. This shift away from monolithic to microservice applications will mean an even greater need for visibility into complex, distributed environments. As a result, APM will evolve to provide even richer data coupled with more powerful analytic capabilities.
Christine Sotelo
Product Marketing Manager, New Relic

Virtualization of servers, networks, and the abstraction of the entire resource infrastructure will challenge APM solutions to maintain operational visibility, reduce troubleshooting time and offer insight into how to optimize IT services. Our prediction for 2015 is that enterprises will ramp their orchestration efforts to achieve enhanced service delivery performance and business efficiencies. Service orchestration will enhance agility to incorporate dynamic application rollouts and the capability to deploy hybrid infrastructure architectures.
Brad Reinboldt
Sr. Product Manager, Network Instruments/JDSU

In 2015 container virtualization will provide the #1 solution for unlocking the promise of big apps. In 2015, containerization will move beyond just Linux (i.e., Docker), into the Windows world. Once there, Windows-based containerization will provide its users with a number of important benefits, such as the ability to dramatically increase application performance and mobility, simplify day-to-day management tasks – such as patch management and asset utilization optimization, ensure high availability (HA) and the operational integrity of the business, and consequently also deliver significant economic benefit across the entire enterprise.
Don Boxley
CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i

A big factor in the upcoming year will be the growth of SDN. As the infrastructure becomes application aware we will see a lot of value being derived from understanding and correlating the performance of applications with the underlying virtualization, server and network infrastructure. Data is only as good as the decisions it allows us to make, and with the flexibility inherent in SDN, we have a lot more options in how we scale and deliver our applications. In order to do effective APM, we must have a holistic view across the whole delivery stack.
Vess Bakalov
Co-Founder and CTO, SevOne

Vess Bakalov Article: The Changing Face of Network Downtime

14. APM DIVIDED BY DEV AND OPS

2015 will bring about a great divide within APM and its subcategories. While code-level APM will continue to increase adoption inside application development, a newer category described by leading analysts as Application Operations Management (AppOps) and Application-Aware Infrastructure Performance Monitoring (AA-IPM) will emerge due to the growing demand for visibility from those responsible for the shared infrastructure across the enterprise.
David Roth
CEO and Co-Founder, AppFirst

2015 will mark a significant shift in the way that APM tools are used by IT Operations teams. Driven by increased implementation of Hybrid-Cloud based applications and massively distributed applications, these teams will stop using APM tools as their go-to primary tool, opting for unified infrastructuure/application monitoring solutions instead. The APM tools will move into an integral code debugging solution for Developer-intensive DevOps processes.
Vic Nyman
COO and Co-Founder, BlueStripe

Vic Nyman Blog: 2015 Predictions - The APM / IT Operations Saga

15. DEVOPS: APM INTEGRATES INTO A MORE COLLABORATIVE DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLE

APM integration into the entire software development life cycle will be the standard for enterprises that want to stay agile. Development, testing and monitoring will be integrated at the core so that all three of these processes and supporting systems will work seamlessly together. In 2015, the software industry will have understood the benefits of development and operations working closely together as the DevOps movement continues to take hold. Testing will be an integral part of the mix so that all APM solutions will integrate with Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Testing solutions.
Alon Girmonsky
Founder and CEO, BlazeMeter

In 2015, APM tools will evolve to enable a better DevOps culture. Integration of APM tools with deployment tools, visualization of pre-deploy and post-deploy performance patterns and automated actions on deployment in response to performance degradation – will be key enhancements in APM tools to aid the DevOps culture. Code level diagnostics in development as well as production environments in the enterprise will become common place. Collaborative problem solving using virtual war rooms will also gain ground to help Developers, Operations and other parties to work smoothly through problem diagnosis.
Payal Chakravarty
Sr. Product Manager - APM, IBM

2015 will be the year that the DevOps tool conversation expands beyond its current (almost singular) focus on configuration automation tools like Puppet and Chef to embrace the fact that collaboration across teams and tools is equally critical to DevOps transformation. As enterprise DevOps efforts expand beyond pilot projects with teams located in the same physical office, organizations will find that SharePoints, emails, conference calls, and instant messaging don’t scale and aren’t effective to aligning distributed teams and tools to support the flow that DevOps is intended to enable. Collaboration capabilities will be increasingly added to existing DevOps-oriented software products. Solutions that enable collaboration across development, project management, and IT operations tools and teams will be sought out and adopted by the many organizations who will struggle with the "uber change" and "uber collaboration” imperative that DevOps represents.
Matthew Selheimer
SVP of Marketing, ITinvolve

Dev teams are finding ITOA invaluable to quickly determine whether problems are due to their code or to something else, e.g. the cloud infrastructure. In 2015, ITOA is predicted to become even more correlative, in terms of not only correlating according all performance and availability data across the IT stack, but relating it with change management data (e.g. from automated code deployment and release management tools), as well. This is going to be critically useful as the large majority of performance and availability issues are caused by changes. This added correlation will also predict the increased deployment of such ITOA tools into the pre-production/QA stage so they can also find potential problems earlier. It is predicted that this “merging” of ITOA tools from pre-production/QA to production uses will become more common.
Phil Tee
Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, Moogsoft

High profile application performance issues in 2014 – such as Healthcare.gov – drove a scramble to understand application performance and institute discipline around DevOps. In 2015 these disciplines are going to become an ante – they will be part of every major project’s stage gate for release. This doesn’t mean that we will settle on standards or that all rollouts will take equal advantage of the tools available – but CIOs and business teams will insist on having performance metrics as part of the go/no-go decision matrix. This is the start of moving the basis of the IT conversation away from availability and towards performance – which ultimately will lead to better results for our customers.
Mark Swanholm
Chief Strategy Officer, Performance Tuning Corporation

BONUS VERTICAL PREDICTION: FINANCIAL SECTOR EMBRACES APM

Banks will upgrade their APM capability in response to an increasing focus on application availability by financial regulators. The provision of online banking has long since moved from a nice-to-have to a service level expectation. In Europe there have been fines in 2014 for banking application down time and in other parts of the world expectations for application availability are being set in regulatory stone, for example, the new MAS TRM guidelines (Monetary Authority of Singapore Technology Risk Management).
Bob Tarzey
Analyst and Director, Quocirca

Check back tomorrow and next week for some more 2015 predictions from our bloggers.