Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020. Part 6 covers log analysis and the cloud.
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5
LOGS ARE KEY TO APM
Logs will be recognized as key aspects of APM — APM is a puzzle made up of user experience, metrics and traces, and logs — and each piece must be incorporated to achieve full-stack visibility and ultimately seamless app performance. However, a "healthy" application is not characterized solely by top performance, but also availability — making a log management solution that monitors availability, enables proactivity, and reacts quickly to remediate problems key. In 2020, implementing solutions that achieve integrated application performance and availability management for any type of organization, including those operating on-premises and/or cloud-based applications across all mixes of cloud environments, will become increasingly important and prioritized.
David Wagner
Senior Manager, Product Marketing, Application Management, SolarWinds
The big win for Log Analysis in the last few years has been focused around SEIM, this is the main driving factor for revenue in the space. But as we move forward these platforms have more and more power around performance, and as the demands of the market shift with new thinking and expectations around cybersecurity emerging today and especially over the next year, we should begin to see a larger interest in performance monitoring from log analysis.
Thomas Hatch
CTO and Co-Founder, SaltStack
CONVERGENCE OF APM, LOG ANALYSIS AND AIOPS
Over the course of 2019 we saw quite a bit of consolidation and commoditization of the monitoring, log management and observability markets. M&A in the space was relatively hot — including both major acquisitions from some of the largest log management and APM vendors in the space, as well as snapping up of newer startups on the scene. In addition, we saw many monitoring vendors begin expanding their capabilities to now include things like log analysis and AIOps, and on the flip side, many logging tools started adding their own APM-like capabilities. In 2020, as enterprises continue to seek ways to streamline their toolchain and address vendor sprawl, I believe we will see more of this consolidation. I don't think we've seen the end of major monitoring tool acquisitions as smaller cloud-native and AIOps solutions continue to crop up, and we can certainly expect to see more of the major players in the APM and log management spaces blurring the lines of traditional capabilities in order to offer a more complete solution to customers.
Tal Weiss
CTO and Co-Founder, OverOps
LOG ANALYSIS BECOMES PART OF OBSERVABILITY PLATFORMS
As cloud-native computing becomes established, log analysis will gradually be subsumed into the broader observability category, which also includes events, metrics, and tracing within a single, coherent platform.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx
As the migration to cloud continues to progress, the need for a comprehensive, easy-to-deploy log analytics solution will become greater. The machine data is not getting smaller, so scalability and reliable architecture are of paramount importance for the modern log analytics platforms. Also, the need for aggregating both unstructured logs and metrics in one central platform will start to become the norm.
Karun Subramanian
IT Operations Expert, karunsubramanian.com
APM IMPROVES SUPPORT FOR CLOUD AND MOBILE
Based on IT Central Station real user reviews in 2019, reviewers have been impressed with APM's ability to unearth issues, but there is a lack of parity in the APM marketplace for cloud and mobile versions versus on-premise. In 2020, vendors who improve their cloud and mobile deployment models to be at par with their on-premise counterparts will likely increase favor with potential buyers.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station
APM TO SUPPORT CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES BASED CLOUD ARCHITECTURE
Performance management of applications will continue to steer towards serving the needs of Kubernetes and FaaS platforms.
Thomas Hatch
CTO and Co-Founder, SaltStack
The application users today expect a seamless user experience as a norm and even a second's delay can hamper user satisfaction and negatively impact conversions. With so much riding on application performance, IT leaders are going to continue turning to cloud infrastructure to provide users with an exemplary digital experience while improving scalability and lowering costs. To keep up, the application environment needs to be dynamic with faster release cycles. The APM vendors would need to provide robust support to containers and microservices based cloud architecture to remain competitive in the years to come.
Rahul Varshneya
Co-Founder, Arkenea
Read 2020 DevOps predictions from Rahul Varshneya: 5 Trends That Are Going To Drive DevOps Forward As 2020 Rolls Around
MIGRATION TO CLOUDS THAT PROVIDE PERFORMANCE METRICS
Cloud performance has long been an issue, with different clouds offering dramatically different real performance parallels. We will continue to see a migration away from general-purpose clouds towards clouds that can deliver specific metrics around performance.
Thomas Hatch
CTO and Co-Founder, SaltStack
MULTI-CLOUD DRIVES APM
Multi-cloud strategies are here to stay. Companies are increasingly adopting more than one platform — either for financial leverage or to create a time-to-market or feature "race" between the platforms. To remain competitive, public cloud providers must offer unique features or capabilities differentiating them from competitors. This has created an upsurge in new and more complex technologies, increasing the need for application performance management tool adoption. 2020 will bring an ever-increasing demand for APM tools and services.
David Wagner
Senior Manager, Product Marketing, Application Management, SolarWinds
APM SUPPORTS MULTI-CLOUD
As enterprises embrace multi-cloud — running their applications across multiple regions in multiple cloud providers — they will need APM solutions that are equally as flexible, reliable and cloud agnostic. It will no longer be acceptable to monitor globally deployed applications from a single point of failure such as a single region of a cloud provider. APM solutions will not only need to be multi-cloud themselves, but as applications move around, they will need to shift resources accordingly in order to continue providing reliable monitoring.
Martin Mao
CEO and Co-Founder, Chronosphere
Go to 2020 ITSM Predictions
