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. Part 2 is all about analytics, Big Data, and dashboards to deliver that knowledge to diverse stakeholders.
Start with Part 1 of "15 APM Predictions for 2015"
6. APM AND ANALYTICS BECOME ONE
APM as a monitoring entity is expanding with new sub-categories of technology that complement its demeanor. Some of these technologies will remain on the periphery; however, others will naturally become part of APM as the market is solidified. I foresee the advanced analytics and behavioral learning technologies being incorporated as product offerings from the most advanced APM solutions that are on the market today.
Larry Dragich
Director of Enterprise Application Services at the Auto Club Group and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.
Larry Dragich's Blog: Driving a Simple Performance Baseline
In 2015, analytics will continue to a be a top APM feature. In 2014, we saw a number of APM solutions bringing out analytics features. This will continue in 2015 as APM increasingly becomes about making forward looking insights by allowing easy querying and presentation of application-centric insights. In addition, in 2015, the primary reason to invest in APM solutions will not be to reduce MTTR. Since the dawn of monitoring and management solutions, their main benefit has been to reduce MTTR. This will change in 2015 as smart IT leaders will realize that good APM and analytics solutions should prevent application issues from happening in the first place. Therefore in 2015, I expect that IT leaders will focus on APM and analytics solutions that can improve metrics such as mean-time-before-failure (MTBF) rather than making MTTR reduction the base necessity.
John Rakowski
Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Forrester Research
John Rakowski: 10 Must-Have APM Capabilities
Analytics will begin serving the needs of others, and the advantages of deep instrumentation will begin to show differences between products which have APM capabilities and those which do not. We will see advances in distributed network analysis, which were previously not handled by today’s cast of characters. Analytics will begin to advance beyond the search and presentation focused offerings of today.
Jonah Kowall
Research VP, IT Operations,Gartner
In 2015 analytics driven APM will mature. In 2014 we saw a growing trend of log analysis usage for better problem diagnosis. In 2015 this trend of search analytics will continue and will become more tightly integrated with APM. The other key area will be self-learning dynamic thresholds to predict problems beforehand rather than detecting them. Another space where analytics will become prominent is optimization of event noise through smarter event correlation. I also think analytics will evolve from detecting and predicting issues to prescribing recommendations and automated actions to resolve application performance problems.
Payal Chakravarty
Sr. Product Manager - APM, IBM
In 2015, real-time analytics will be a “need to have” not a “nice to have” for enterprises that compete based on the strength of their IT services. The companies that will thrive in todayâ's instant access marketplaces are that can identify problems early and begin resolving them before they have huge adverse effects on customers.
Kevin Conklin
VP of Marketing, Prelert
We love to measure everything in the monitoring world, and 2015 is going to be no different. New advances in technology and the expansion of mobile devices will mean even more data to be collected, and with new data will come an expansion of analytics. We’re already seeing new analysis capabilities in the form of CDF charts and historical comparisons, and I’m anticipating being able to drill down even deeper into data – and integrate it into existing metrics – in order to provide the best possible look at the impact of performance.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint
Mehdi Daoudi's Blog: Prepare for the Greatest eCommerce Challenge
7. REAL-TIME BIG DATA ANALYTICS DRIVE APM
Big Data has become almost a mainstream word. But, analytics for Big Data, not as much. In 2015 we will start to see the walls between business and IT begin to crumble (or at least further crack) as the business’ needs to rapidly analyze large volumes of data for perishable insights becomes paramount. In order to accomplish this we will need applications that can rapidly stream data for real-time analysis. APM will be used to ensure these newly critical applications perform effectively. In this year we will see the need for real-time, big data analytics drive the importance of APM as the business and IT collaborate to make this work.
Charley Rich
VP Product Management and Marketing, Nastel Technologies
We have seen only the beginning of the M2M wave of big data associated with APM. It’s not only the volume that will go up, but the ways in which it flows. Systems must be able to cope with and normalize this multifaceted data in real time.
Vess Bakalov
Co-Founder and CTO, SevOne
I expect to see a new generation of IT operations analytics tools, based on blended analytics that can more proactively detect anomalies, predict outages, provide deep diagnostics and resolve issues within a real-time business context. By correlating various silo-sourced data (log, performance, configurations, security etc.), the next generation of IT Operations Analytics tools will be better positioned to sift through terabytes of operations data in real time, spotting and presenting issues to users in a more understandable context.
Sasha Gilenson
CEO, Evolven
From gleaning the product reviews on IT Central Station, I can share with you one of the top features that real users cite as lacking in current APM tools: deep analytics. I predict vendors will address this critical need in 2015.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station
Click here to read the latest APM product reviews on IT Central Station
Performance Management in Big Data will become a significant revenue and market capturing opportunity for major APM players in 2015.
Gary Nakamura
CEO, Concurrent
8. ITOA AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MERGE
The gap between business analytics and IT analytics is quickly narrowing. In 2015, software analytics and business analytics will be viewed as one in the same and as a critical piece of business intelligence from stakeholders on both sides of the equation.
Maneesh Joshi
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing and Strategy, AppDynamics
Maneesh Joshi's Blog: 2015 APM Predictions from AppDynamics
Maneesh Joshi's Blog: Big Data Transforming IT and Becoming Core to DevOps
In 2015, digital marketing analytics solutions will collide with APM analytics features. As APM solutions push upwards into the business with the value they provide then I expect analytics features to encroach on features provided by digital marketing analytics solutions (e.g. Google Analytics). Successful APM solution providers will coalign with digital marketing solution providers through strategic partnerships to shift the focus from just application performance to digital service performance.
John Rakowski
Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Forrester Research
9. APM DASHBOARDS SERVE DIVERSE STAKEHOLDERS
In 2015, APM will break out of the hallows of the back-office and onto the CXO’s desk as it transforms a vast array of disconnected service and infrastructure data points into an analytics dashboard that is accessible to both line of business and IT users. This APM analytics dashboard will become a strategic weapon that better supports the business by ensuring business applications are optimized, highly available and accessible to anyone from anywhere.
Bill Berutti
President of the Performance and Availability Business at BMC Software
Q&A Part One: BMC Talks About APM
The focus on customer experience management will drive organizations to undertake end-end monitoring of all of their web, native mobile, mobile enabled web and API assets, using a single platform. These platforms will also necessarily evolve to become more “answer-centric”- with the ability to surface up differing levels of actionable insights and pertinent detail to a diverse group of stakeholders – business owners, IT/Ops personnel, QA engineers and developers.
Denis Goodwin
Director of Product Management, AlertSite by SmartBear
Denis Goodwin's Blog: User Experience Is Bigger Than Data
From a functional perspective, competitive pressure will drive an increased focus on accessibility, particularly from those vendors with high end APM solutions.
Larry Haig
Senior Consultant, Intechnica
10. BSM STRIKES AGAIN
The APM frenzy will start to expose shortcomings in terms of integrated insights into change management, capacity optimization and broader alignment with business values that will move the discussion closer to Business Service Management (BSM). This was my prediction last year — and I’ve already seen trends in this area, exacerbated by cloud and DevOps, among other things. Maybe 2015 will be the year when the industry finally takes a deep breath and recognizes the need for a new, more dynamic service-aware management system that’s truly cross-silo.
Dennis Drogseth
VP of Research, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
Dennis Drogseth's Blog: Advanced Operations Analytics - What the Data Shows!
My biggest prediction for APM in 2015 is that it needs a name change. As digital experiences become the primary way brands engage with users APM is moving up the business stack. I've dubbed this Unified Business Monitoring.
Ken Godskind
Chief Blogger and Analyst, APMexaminer.com
Ken Godskind's Blog: How Analytics and Big Data are Overcoming the Challenges of APM
Read the last 5 predictions in Part 3 of "15 APM Predictions for 2015"
