As part of APMdigest's 2020 predictions, industry experts offer predictions on how Network Performance Management (NPM) and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020.

Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions

SD-WAN TAKES A PERFORMANCE HIT

The accelerated adoption of SD-WAN technology that we saw this year will continue throughout 2020, but we predict it will take a performance hit due to visibility blind spots. Organizations that aren't able to effectively monitor the overlay, verify policies or identify bandwidth utilization issues will experience inefficient application routing, degraded application performance and more. This lack of visibility can result in negative end-user experiences, poor performance, and increased troubleshooting and management pressures — all of which diminish network agility improvements and the cost and resource savings the SD-WAN was originally deployed to deliver.
John Smith
EVP and CTO, LiveAction

BGP-RELATED OUTAGES REDUCED

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) related outages caused major collateral damage in 2019, leading many ISPs to adopt better Internet routing hygiene measures, which will dramatically decline these issues in 2020.
Angelique Medina
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ThousandEyes

RISK OF MAJOR DNS-RELATED OUTAGES

Domain Name System (DNS), as an often overlooked service, may be ripe for a major disruption or compromise that could cause ripple effects across the wider Internet. Past DNS attacks such as Dyn have had a huge blast radius, causing widespread outages and creating a devastating impact on businesses — so enterprises should prepare (or brace) themselves for the inevitability of a DNS breakage.
Angelique Medina
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ThousandEyes

CLOUD CAUSES NETWORK MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES

As cloud adoption shows no signs of slowing down in 2020, a lack of visibility into cloud infrastructures will create monitoring and management problems for NetOps teams. In 2019, most executives have turned a blind eye to the visibility problem due to the impressive cost savings and ROI. However, this will begin to change in 2020 as real cloud visibility problems impact operations. To overcome these challenges, NetOps will increasingly rely on network monitoring solutions that can offer end-to-end visibility and situational awareness across multi-fabric networks.
John Smith
EVP and CTO, LiveAction

NPM REMAINS ESSENTIAL

Over the last year, we saw numerous instances of the network being the primary source of performance problems — domain name server (DNS) failures, cloud outages, border gateway protocol (BGP) misdirects and more. In 2020, organizations will be sharpening their ability to detect and respond to this growing range of network-based threats.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

Companies have access to more data today than ever before, and they will need to collect and analyze these vast quantities of data quickly (and accurately) to support the real-time decision making that will become standard in the enterprise of the future. This puts the onus on enterprise IT to ensure their networks don't suffer from chronic traffic bottlenecks, which in turn require network monitoring solutions that can automatically parse through massive traffic volumes to give accurate insights with minimal delay. Network performance monitoring is going to continue to be essential to deliver the visibility network teams and enterprise IT needs to ensure these digital transformations go off without a hitch.
Matt Stevens
CEO, AppNeta

BETTER NPM DASHBOARDS AND USER INTERFACES

According to reviewers on IT Central Station, better dashboards and user interfaces will be a priority for 2020. While the information in network performance software is great for putting out fires, IT Central Station community members are requesting solutions with a single pane of glass to consolidate and which can integrate all their data to avoid using multiple interfaces. Finding a consolidation solution for the GUI that contains the plethora of information NPM provides will be a key success factor next year in this competitive market.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

VISIBILITY INTO NETWORK MIGRATIONS

Exoprise predicts that 2020 will see more network transformations and migrations from legacy MPLS to SDWAN with local branch-office breakouts for faster end-user experience and reliability. Cloud/SaaS and UCaaS solutions are seeing massive adoption and replacement of legacy VoIP is driving these network and cloud transformations. These enterprise network migrations require Digital Experience Monitoring solutions that include synthetics, for baselining and benchmarking, as well as Real User Monitoring (RUM) for troubleshooting and end-user experience.
Jason Lieblich
CEO, Exoprise

VISIBILITY INTO MICROSERVICES

Visibility will be vital to ensuring digital transformation efforts. I expect DevOps teams of all organizations to continue deploying microservices in higher volumes in 2020, putting enormous pressure on security and compliance teams to maintain security posture. Visibility into traffic streams to, from and between microservices will become critical to ensure organizations can monitor and secure these applications while meeting company standards for digital transformation.
Shane Buckley
President and Chief Operating Officer, Gigamon

SELF-HEALING NETWORKS

We've already seen AI-driven automation being used for things like service requests and IT service management, and there's a lot of potential to take these same technologies and expand them to other parts of the enterprise. For instance, I believe there's a huge opportunity when it comes to using AI, analytics and automation to enable self-healing so as to take load off operations staff at NOCs (Network Operations Center).
Dr. Akhil Sahai
CPO, Symphony SummitAI

PRIVATE BACKBONE NETWORKS

As the amount of Internet traffic grows by the minute with every TikTok video, business traffic is competing against cat videos on a network that it wasn't designed for. Just as the ThousandEyes Cloud Performance Benchmark report found Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure preferring to use their own private backbone networks (with AWS and IBM also offering this option), we'll see more SaaS companies and cloud-based service providers creating private backbone networks to optimize their own network traffic instead of relying on the unpredictable public Internet.
Angelique Medina
Senior Product Marketing Manager, ThousandEyes

Go to 2020 Network Performance Management Predictions - Part 2