The Holiday Season means it is time for APMdigest's 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 for more than a decade. 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 2022.

Despite the title, this predictions list is not only about APM. Throughout the year, APMdigest covers a variety of related technologies beyond APM, and this year's predictions list offers an equally broad scope of topics. In addition to APM, the related technologies covered include AIOps,Observability, OpenTelemetry, IT Service Management (ITSM), User Experience Management, and a relatively new hot topic, remote work and work from home (WFH).

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. Several predictions even directly contradict each other. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers a timely and fascinating snapshot of what the IT industry and the APM market are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for 2022.

The predictions will be posted in 7 parts over the next two weeks, with separate lists of predictions for NPM and Cloud to follow after the holidays. Meanwhile, DEVOPSdigest is posting a series of DevOps and development-related predictions for 2022.

A forecast by the top minds in Application Performance Management today, here are the predictions. Part 1 covers Application Performance Management.

APM FOR THE CLOUD

In the beginning, the cloud made everything easier. However, cloud complexity has increased dramatically, and our approach to the cloud and application performance management must change in response. When it comes to the application stack, there is a daunting number of choices — which vendor and what to run. For compute, there are over 400 different instance types on AWS alone. Add on to that a hybrid solution, and the choices companies need to make to move their data and application explodes. Then, there's the question of managing cloud compute costs so they stay within budget. Future APM solutions will no longer be just about debugging and tuning on an application-by-application basis. The future of application performance management needs visibility and automation to manage your compute, software stack, and ensure that your costs are within budget.
Ashfaq Munshi
CEO, Pepperdata

APM SCALABILITY

The pandemic accelerated the trend towards the increasing scale of application environments being monitored by APM. In 2022 some of this increase will begin to normalize, but the new normal will be a steeper scale-up trajectory with greater variability in the monitored footprint because of the growing use of public and hybrid cloud technologies. This will require APM tools to flexibly scale themselves to handle the volume of telemetry, and therefore adopt the very same public and hybrid cloud technologies of the environments they monitor.
James Kao
Head of Engineering, APM, Broadcom

Scalability to handle the increasing complexity of evolving IT infrastructures will enable a single point of management across thousands of business services.
Andreas Reiss
Head of Product Management, AIOps, Broadcom

APM PAY-PER-USE

Application complexity will drive innovation in APM cost reduction, so you'll only pay for what you use.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

APM FALLS BEHIND

Siloed APM solutions will continue to fall behind tools that integrate multiple sources of performance data into a cohesive whole.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

APM HAS NO REACH

Unless they evolve to match today's digital wilderness, the value of agent-based APM will be questionable. 62% of organizations use at least one, if not more, multi-same-service platforms (e.g., multi-DNS or multi-CDN) to extend the reach of their services. Coupled with other evolutions such as the ability to embed compute and storage within 5G networks, as we are seeing in AWS Wavelength, traditional APM has no reach. It might be a scary thought, but APM approaches must consider larger, holistic, reachability-based touchpoints. This needs to encompass everything from local dev environments to extensions on users' laptops — because they all are a part of today's overall digital experience ecosystem.
Leo Vasiliou
Director of Product Marketing, Catchpoint

REACHABILITY IS THE NEW AVAILABILITY

Have you considered that reachability is the new availability? Why? Reachability is crucial for business because it asks, "What good is a brightly burning sun if its rays cannot reach you on the beach on a cloudy day?" Taking this to APM, "What good is a highly performing cloud if its service(s) cannot reach users where they are in the world?" The action-shaping, belief factors, which help "brain frame" a reshaped APM are: The Internet is your new network; the cloud is your new datacenter; CDN (and other third-party platforms) are your new racks and cabinets; slow performance is the new down; reachability is the new availability.
Leo Vasiliou
Director of Product Marketing, Catchpoint

APM BECOMES IRRELEVANT

Companies run ever more services in ever more places. This leads to increased decentralization and a division of engineering responsibilities. We'll see debugging requests become less useful at the holistic level than managing the aggregate performance of the entire system. While continuing to be useful to development teams, APM will become irrelevant for operations teams.
Tobias Kunze
CEO and Co-Founder, Glasnostic

APM IS DEAD

The death knell for APM tolls as OpenTelemetry adoption reaches critical mass.
Martin MaoCEO and Co-Founder, Chronosphere

APM CONVERGES WITH SECURITY

IT Central Station users predict that in the coming year, APMs will start to become more involved in the security realm. It seems like a natural fit that they should start playing into that space.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station, (soon to be PeerSpot)

APM CONVERGES WITH AIOPS

Application performance monitoring has withstood the test of time in a sector that's always transitioning, but it is not without challenges. Application performance monitoring has adjusted itself to match the emerging trends to keep its place anchored in the industry. Isn't that ironic? In 2022, APM will evolve again to suit the capricious palate of the IT industry and this time, the focal point will be AIOps. DevOps admins spend a great deal of man-hours and wasteful energy on tracking various metrics and troubleshooting issues. The increased synergy between AIOps and APM systems can substantially lower the time and energy spent on identifying performance visibility gaps and detecting anomalies, and as a corollary, that can be diverted into accelerating innovation across the software development lifecycle.
Arun Balachandran
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, ManageEngine

Go to: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2, covering AIOps predictions.