Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020. Part 5 covers monitoring.

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

OBSERVABILITY

Traditional APM will make way for Observability. As the size of K8s deployments grow dramatically, observability will become a primary concern. Traditional APM approaches will quickly prove to be incapable (both in feature-functionality and practicality) of managing these rapidly decomposing, dynamic, finely-grained systems and we'll see more modern approaches, tools, and "best practices" appear. These tools will focus on being able to answer richer questions about the state of complex microservices-based systems as opposed to just viewing overall statistics or logs.
Brian Kelly
Head of Conjur Engineering, CyberArk

Observability is the future of infrastructure monitoring because it helps IT teams catch the unknown unknowns that they wouldn't otherwise think to monitor. Systems and infrastructure grow increasingly complex every year. These modern systems and the adoption of the cloud require that we reconsider how we monitor the systems we run. I think observability and the discussion around it is helping shape those considerations by helping IT teams catch future problems before they have a chance to manifest.
Greg Campion
Cloud Engineer, Paessler AG

HYBRID IT MONITORING

While applications continue their shift to public clouds, the importance of a hybrid IT monitoring solution will intensify. Part of this necessity is driven by performance and security. While there has been an exuberance, maybe even over exuberance, for cloud-based solutions, the reality of performance and security problems as well as the lack of control of the infrastructure in those cloud architectures has occurred for several enterprises over the last two years. A hybrid architecture overcomes this by blending both worlds (public cloud and physical on-premises) so that enterprise IT engineers and architects can overcome any shortcomings experienced in 2019.
Keith Bromley
Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing, Ixia Solutions Group a Keysight Technologies business

CONTAINER MONITORING

Users will want more capabilities in their APM tools, especially around the area of container performance monitoring. As opentracing and other opensource tools gain more ground, commercial vendors will be forced to rethink their value proposition.
Karun Subramanian
IT Operations Expert, karunsubramanian.com

EDGE MONITORING

Edge monitoring will make a prolific jump this year. As the importance of edge monitoring increases, there will be an increased need for APM, NPM, and security solutions to guarantee QoS, QoE, and security for endpoints. The drivers for this transformation will continue to be cost savings, IoT expansion, and the convenience of IP links.
Keith Bromley
Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing, Ixia Solutions Group a Keysight Technologies business

AIOps will be widely used on the edge. AIOps solutions typically run from the cloud. Yet this is getting more expensive and sluggish, as data volumes and use cases grow. As a result, companies will begin to deploy AI tools on the edge of the network, where it's faster and often cheaper. This will enable near real-time AI-enhanced monitoring, eliminating the travel time from the data center to cloud service and back.
Bhanu Singh
VP Product Development and Cloud Operations, OpsRamp

Read more 2020 AI predictions from Bhanu Singh: How AI Will Evolve for IT in 2020

THIRD-PARTY MONITORING

Businesses are increasingly relying on third-party services to implement key product capabilities, such as data storage, content delivery, document search, CRM, and user engagement products like email, SMS, or push notifications. The widening availability of strong third party solutions has helped businesses reduce development time, but has also introduced many new failure points. APM solutions must go beyond tracking first-party performance and also ensure that third-party integrations perform consistently and reliably.
George Deglin
CEO and Founder, OneSignal

INTEGRATION OF INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING WITH WORKLOAD AUTOMATION AND CAPACITY PLANNING

In 2020, enterprises looking to gain full visibility into their hybrid IT environments will require solutions that integrate infrastructure monitoring, workload automation and capacity planning into one platform. As such, vendors who fail to adopt this model of service and enterprises who fail to invest in end-to-end infrastructure visibility will be unable to deliver on customer requirements and performance SLAs.
Philippe Vincent
CEO, Virtana

MONITORING BRIDGES GAP WITH OPEN SOURCE TOOLS

In 2020, APM tools (well, a few of them) will bridge the gap between closed-down locked-in proprietary monitoring and open-minded adaptive value-focused monitoring, creating solutions that include the best of automatic monitoring and tracing for application response time, correlated with the context developers make available through open source instrumentation of their code.
Mirko Novakovic
CEO, Instana

MONITORING MOVES FROM SNMP TO REST API

SNMP has historically been the go-to protocol for monitoring devices and hardware. Just about every piece of IT hardware is accessible using SNMP. But cloud services and IoT devices are quickly uprooting that norm. In the near future, SNMP will no longer be standard. Instead, the move will be towards REST API. After all, services running in the cloud can still be queried and an increasing number of hardware manufacturers are providing a REST API that can gather data about the device's health and functioning. Not to mention, using REST API makes it possible to bring the data into the unified view.
Steven Feurer
CTO, Paessler AG

RISING UP AGAINST ALERT OVERLOAD

I see a growing push against "alert overload", which means giving ourselves the space and time to focus so teams can do their best work without constant interruption.
Andrew Childs
Co-Founder, Clubhouse

PROGRESSIVE WEB APPLICATIONS

The lines between mobile applications and websites will begin to blur. Fast-moving technology companies will increasingly adopt technologies like Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) as an alternative to building native apps. Businesses will increasingly look towards modern APM solutions that have been designed to work well with PWAs and native applications built with web technologies.
George Deglin
CEO and Founder, OneSignal

Go to 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6, covering logs and cloud.