The Holiday Season is the time for the annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, the most popular content on APMdigest, viewed by tens of thousands of people in the IT community around the world every year. 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.

APMdigest covers a variety of related technologies beyond APM, and this year's predictions list does the same. In addition to APM, the related technologies covered include IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) also called Advanced IT Analytics (AIA), IT Service Management (ITSM), End-User Experience Management (EUEM), Network Performance Management (NPM), as well as infrastructure monitoring.

The 2018 APM Predictions List is the longest predictions list ever featured on APMdigest. Last year's list featured 50 prediction categories, while this year's list features 60 categories. This extensive list of predictions reflects the vast scope of digital transformation accompanied by the continuously changing IT landscape.

Some of these predictions may come true in the next 12 months, while others may be just as valid but take several years to be realized. Still others may be wishful thinking or unbased fears. Some predictions even directly conflict with each other. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers a timely and engrossing snapshot of what the IT industry and the APM market are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for next year.

The predictions will be posted in 7 parts over the next few weeks.

A forecast by the top minds in Application Performance Management today, here are the predictions:

SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

Based on 315+ reviews of APM solutions on IT Central Station, the feature that many of our community members expect from their APM solution is a single pane of glass. In 2018, APM vendors who continue to build-out their single pane of glass functionalities will be the champions in the competitive market.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

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

We expect 2018 to be the pivotal year where the majority of IT teams re-engineer their traditional and functionally silo'd structures towards cross-discipline teams aligned to customer journeys and business outcomes. In doing so, narrow tech-centric tooling will give way to monitoring models that facilitate fast feedback, collaboration and knowledge sharing. In this sense, application performance management will be a critical enabler; providing all teams a single source-of-truth into customer experience and presenting any performance impact in context of roles and responsibilities — all the way from the office of the CIO to site reliability engineering squads.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

UNIFIED OBSERVABILITY

Silo monitoring of yesteryear will give way to unified observability. Breaking down the monitoring silos between user, application, system, network and security event data will help us pinpoint which optimization will have most impact on overall performance.
Peco Karayanev
Sr. Product Manager, Riverbed

APM: MISSION-CRITICAL

Application Performance Management (APM) tools help organizations to scrupulously monitor and create applications that ensure desired performance and accessibility. APM will continue to add business value for enterprises in 2018, as it will help diagnose the complex issues and lead to an improvement in application performance and customer experience. APM will also play a crucial role in ensuring that applications continue to sustain and perform even in a virtual scenario that is prone to cyber-attacks and risks.
Sairam Vedam
VP & Global Head, Marketing, Cigniti Technologies

BSM REVIVAL

Business Service Management will continue to have a revival in 2018. While the term has been around for over a decade, the ability to understand, quickly and easily, how Business and IT services are actually driving business benefits has been difficult. The evolution of APM now makes this possible and through this next year, APM vendors will be evaluated on how they are able to provide real-time information on how applications and processes are driving business outcomes.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

OPEN SOURCE APM

Open source APM and transaction tracking will begin to mature significantly in 2018, but will still require an extremely heavy lift (code changes and lots of infrastructures) from organizations creating what will eventually become unmaintainable systems over time due to complexity.
Jonah Kowall
VP of Market Development and Insights, AppDynamics

Read Jonah Kowall's Blog: Looking Back at 2017 APM Predictions - Did They Come True?

SELF SERVICE IT

In 2018, ITSM vendors will continue improving the UX of their platforms, with an eye towards increasing workflow efficiency for both IT department staff and for IT end-users. Self-service tools (for end-users) really took off in 2017 and we expect by the end of 2018 they'll have become an expected feature and included in even the most basic ITSM suites.
Craig Borowski
Content Analyst, Software Advice (a Gartner Company)

SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

In 2018 we will see the rise of site reliability engineering. One of the key tools they need is an APM solution that is developer friendly.
Matt Watson
Founder and CEO, Stackify

With the rise of continuous delivery and DevOps, a new breed of IT operations professionals is defining how services are delivered and managed. As comfortable with Python and Ruby as with configuration and capacity, they are leading the way in areas like systems automation, architectural flexibility, developer empowerment and site reliability to deliver better applications faster and with an exceptional user experience. As such, the Site Reliability Engineer role will become mainstream as many professionals refresh their software development skillsets so they can collaborate more effectively with developers.
Rick Fitz
SVP and GM of IT Markets, Splunk

DEVOPS TRANSFORMS INCIDENT MANAGEMENT

Trends in agile/DevOps will continue to transform incident management and war-room decision making, but the transformation will be a two-way street, as core advances in IT alerting, incident handling and analytics impact both sides of the equation, and best practices evolve to support a wider variety of toolsets and stakeholders.
Dennis Drogseth
VP of Research, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

Read Dennis Drogseth's Blog: At the Crossroads of Digital Transformation: The Future of the Advanced IT Analytics "Market"

APM ENABLES DEVOPS SUCCESS

2018 is the year that the industry realizes that you can't "just scratch the surface" either in adopting a DevOps culture or in adopting a cloud native architecture to get the business outcomes you desire. As a consequence, the APM market will fill the gap to steer application teams toward success in both adopting cloud native architectures and embracing DevOps best practices. This will include building in key business metrics allowing teams to quickly iterate to reach the desired business outcomes.
Mike Mallo
Offering Management Lead for APM, IBM

Read 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2, covering ITIL, ITSM and more.