APMdigest invited industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — to predict how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2019. Part 2 covers more about APM, monitoring and ecommerce.

Start with 2019 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

ALIGNING IT PERFORMANCE AND BUSINESS METRICS

With eCommerce sales continuing to rise, it is clear that the need to focus on improving user experience and app performance is more important than ever. With consumers leveraging multiple channels and interacting with chatbots, IT teams must ensure that they have the proper solutions in place to be able to monitor and measure the user journey from user to device or device to device. The ability to align business metrics with IT performance metrics will become increasingly important to better understand how performance directly impacts revenue.
Ashley George
Product Marketing Manager, Broadcom

API MONITORING

For 2019, we can expect to see an increase in API Monitoring. Currently, most organizations are just beginning to scratch the surface with their API Monitoring strategies. With the increased reliance on APIs for key business functionality, API Monitoring strategies will become a necessity for resolving API issues.
Denis Goodwin
Director of Product Management, AlertSite by SmartBear

HOLISTIC MONITORING

In 2019, organizations will seek more control over the inherent lack of performance visibility (speed, uptime) and resulting SLA infractions, for the external cloud, SaaS, and third-party services they increasingly depend upon. Since cloud-only monitoring doesn't sufficiently track the end-user impact of such services, companies will adopt a more holistic approach, monitoring from a variety of vantage points including backbone, intranet, broadband, ISP, last mile and wireless network locations. This will eliminate blind spots and serve to reduce the number of micro-outages, which are an increasingly frequent source of downtime.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

BIG DATA MONITORING

There are as many types of monitoring tools as there are monitoring strategies. APM for instance, was traditionally created to help with the business case of monitoring clicks and performance to enable people having good experiences when engaging in online transactions. These solutions tend to focus on the "front side" of the house, covering web-to-database paths. Today, however, many organizations have 80%-90% of the code and the IP doing data crunching that is completely outside of the APM footprint. Taking the mountains of data and crunching that data requires a different kind of solution. Currently, no one is really driving this kind of solution well. Prediction: Within the next 1-2 years a new space will emerge based on the increase in modern workloads that are doing data-crunching. This will happen in all type of environments (e.g. on-premises), but will be more emphasized in cloud environments. Today, most servers are doing all the data crunching, so we expect to see more advanced elements of this new space happen offline. These new solutions will fully understand the different needs of customers for offline-workloads as organizations seek new and innovative ways to provide special capabilities to their customers. We also expect to see the adaptation of the current team to a new type of environment.
Gadi Oren
VP of Products, LogicMonitor

STREAMING DATA

As the stream increasingly becomes the system of record organizations in 2019 will need to think about what to do with streaming data beyond collection and log analysis. The opportunity is for organizations to make their streams stateful and then use that stateful stream data to develop new applications. Use cases include: predictive maintenance, AI-based detection and response, productivity and yield analysis, security analytics and smart video monitoring.
Bill Peterson
VP, Industry Solutions, MapR

TIME TO INSIGHT

As businesses everywhere continue to strive for greater efficiency of delivering innovative digital services to their customers, Time to Insight (TTI) — the time it takes to collect, organize, and analyze information to generate the intelligence an organization requires regarding the performance of these services — will increasingly become a measure of business success. In today's competitive environment, where everything happens in real time, it's no longer viable to take hours, or even days, to analyze the volume and variety of data needed to provide a business with any meaningful insight. Therefore, the shorter a company's TTI, the faster, more responsive, more efficient and more profitable they will be. For businesses to gain these kinds of insights, resolve business services issues or mitigate risks as fast as possible in 2019, they must adopt a new approach to utilizing data. We'll see TTI drive businesses toward smart data, harvesting all the important information from every action and transaction that traverses the entire enterprise infrastructure through traffic flows and compressing it into metadata at its source, in real time. Ultimately, this will give businesses the visibility to assess the performance and security of services, improve the quality of the actionable intelligence and reduce the TTI.
Michael Segal
Area VP, Strategy, NetScout

Predictive APM

ERP and CRM vendors alike will increasingly leverage true user behavior data in their push for real-life business applications infused with Machine Learning and AI capabilities. In the CRM space, the ML/AI algorithms will be augmented with real-time user data, as a way to make applications more responsive to human interactions. We are also predicting a similar trend in the APM space, with
more and more APM vendors embedding automated and predictive capabilities into their solutions, in conjunction with augmenting their traditional technical KPIs and SLAs with user-centric metrics, to gauge true user experience and business impact of IT solutions.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

INCIDENT MANAGEMENT

Major internet services will continue to fail, taking down significant portions of the internet. As a result, incident management will continue to grow in importance for all companies. As more companies adopt cloud services, incident communication will become a core part of service level agreements between service providers and their customers in 2019. Service providers that struggle with public incident communication will erode trust and lose customers to their competitors.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu
Head of Product, OpsGenie

FULL IT RESILIENCE

In the last year, 70 percent of businesses experienced at least one IT outage in the last 12 months. These incidents were most frequently caused by natural disasters, errors while implementing new technology, ransomware and IT overloads, respectively. To decrease the risk of outages and disruptions, and to improve recovery time when they do occur, we believe that we will see more businesses trying to achieve full IT resilience, through a combination of disaster recovery planning and technology, backup in the cloud and continuous data protection. Companies need to recruit the right IT talent either in-house or through external consultants and invest in the best IT solutions to stay ahead of the game - whether that's planning for natural disasters or fighting off the latest malware or virus. If they fail to do so, businesses risk being hit by the high costs associated with unplanned IT downtime.
Matt VanderZwaag
Director of Product Development, US Signal

It is important not to make downtime vulnerability an acceptable risk, in order to focus on continuous development, speed and performance. We hope that, in 2019, more business leaders will opt for technologies that provide assurances that all workloads, data, and applications are protected no matter where they reside, where they are moved to or what outside influences impact them. Achieving this, without slowing the pace of business transformation, will be the great technology challenge that business leaders should look to overcome in 2019.
Ziv Kedem
CEO, Zerto

Read 2019 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3, covering the end user experience and web performance.