The Holiday Season is the time for the 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 every year. 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 2019.
APMdigest covers a variety of related technologies beyond APM, and this year's predictions list does the same. In addition to APM, the related technologies covered include IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) also called Advanced IT Analytics (AIA), IT Service Management (ITSM), and End-User Experience Management (EUEM), as well as infrastructure monitoring. APMdigest will be posting separate lists of Network Performance Management (NPM) predictions and Cloud predictions after the first of the year.
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. Some predictions even directly conflict with each other. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers a timely and engrossing snapshot of what the IT industry and the APM market are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for next year.
The predictions will be posted in 6 parts over the next week, with NPM and Cloud lists to follow after the holidays.
A forecast by the top minds in Application Performance Management today, here are the predictions:
APM with ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
Based on 400+ reviews of over 80 APM solutions on IT Central Station, our community members expect their APM solution to more easily pinpoint the root cause of an issue. In 2019, APM vendors who can drill down into a problem and provide its source quickly and efficiently will maintain their popularity among their users.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station
2019 will see an increase in demand for APM tools that connect the dots across the cloud, container and microservices stack to address the diverse needs of various stakeholders — both experts and non-experts. Monitoring monoliths is hard enough, but microservices make it 10x harder due to polyglot environments and cyclic dependencies. As a result, non-expert stakeholders will be overwhelmed and will need information-dense descriptive and prescriptive reports that can cut through the noise and make it easy to diagnose and triage issues.
Arun Aravamudhan
Principal Architect, eG Innovations
APM EVOLVES TO HANDLE MODERN APP ARCHITECTURES
As more enterprises adopt modern app architectures using Kubernetes and containers, APM solutions will evolve from simple monitoring solutions to platforms of intelligence. Machine learning, pattern causality, and various algorithms will be fully integrated with APM to help tame the sprawling data complexity needed to understand user experience and performance. In addition, APM solutions will need to deliver a new level of elegance when collecting data, adopt new visualization techniques and provide its own inherent ability to naturally scale in order to meet the ephemeral demands introduced by these new modern application architectures.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, Broadcom
CTOs and application architects will hit a wall trying to use old tools and techniques to monitor dynamic, microservices based applications as they scale into production.
John Van Siclen
CEO, Dynatrace
Digital Performance Management (DPM) has been late to really get up to speed with containers. 2019 is definitely going to be the year everyone in this space catches up with containers. Expect APM vendors to be acquiring small niche companies focused on containers.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Eggplant
APM ENABLES DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
APM will become critical component to enable real time analytics and visibility required for companies to succeed at their Digital Transformation initiatives. Business Service Management always intended on including APM but the technology was still too nascent. With newer discovery tools, hybrid environments, and out of control costs — Enterprises will demand addressing this critical gap affecting cost, compliance and agility in their Digital Transformation strategy.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud
Mobile APM
If businesses want to succeed in 2019, they need to be investing in mobile. Mobile app usage is increasing exponentially — with users spending the majority of their time in apps (across multiple devices) vs on the web. With consumer expectations high, it's important that your app is performing and delivering the experience they expect. In order to do so, IT teams must ensure that their APM solutions are enabled to deliver advanced user journey insights with funnel analysis and user segmentation capabilities. Machine learning capabilities will also become increasingly important to help manage the influx of data and help reduce the dependencies on development.
Ashley George
Product Marketing Manager, Broadcom
APM and TRACING
The commoditization of distributed tracing will see more and more vendors jumping on the APM bandwagon. This is often positioned as a war between traditional APM and OpenTracing but it's really not an “either/or” but rather a “better together.” This artificial divide can be bridged by enhancing application tracing with the context exposed by OpenTracing to produce a richer distributed trace. While open-source options may look attractive, organizations will need to choose sustainable APM strategies that are managed, curated, supported and universal.
Amena Siddiqi
Product Marketing Director - SteelCentral APM, Riverbed
FOCUS ON APP HEALTH
Application health will replace APM. Imagine a doctor signing off on your physical after a quick glance — no stethoscope, no blood pressure, no looking in your eyes and ears — you would leave with only a skin-deep picture of your health. That is traditional application performance management. But applications rely on infrastructure; they rely on networks; they rely on thousands of interconnected nodes to function properly. In 2019, I expect to see a greater focus on application health rather than APM alone. Enterprises will want to see deeper into the underpinning technology layers that support their applications, whether on prep, in public cloud or with their MSPs.
Russ Elsner
Solutions Architect, ScienceLogic
RETHINKING DPM
Best in class companies will rethink their definition of Digital Performance Management. The discipline will no longer exclusively apply to IT or software performance, but it will be about increasing the velocity of digital inventory, in terms of value and capability successfully delivered to customers.
Jason English
Principal Analyst & CMO , Intellyx
CHANGING APM MARKET
The APM market is worth around US$6 billion and projected to reach US$9 Billion in just five years. The recent acquisition of Appdynamics by Cisco and CA by Broadcom, is just an indication of much more APM related mergers, acquisitions and also startups to come in 2019. This year alone (2018) there's been a bunch of promising new startups in this market.
Hayden James
Linux Systems Analyst, haydenjames.io
Read 2019 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2, covering more predictions about APM, monitoring and ecommerce.
