Current Issues
The difficult issues in APM currently revolve around two trends in the IT industry. The first is that for many enterprises, only a small fraction of their business critical applications are web based and written to JEE or .NET. For these enterprises who may have business critical applications like SAP that use "fat" Win32 clients, their APM need can only be met by engaging with vendors offering deep End User Experience monitoring for a specific set of enterprise applications. The second issue is that many applications systems are being virtualized, which has the effect of breaking the validity of time based performance metrics gathered within the guest OS where the application is running. This requires a totally new approach to APM tuned to the requirements of virtualized systems.
Most analysts do not cover User Experience Management (Monitoring) within the context of APM. Only one analyst covers it within APM and they only cover basic EUE monitoring - not enterprise class. This seems to suggest a break-away of the category of products that include Enterprise EUE and/or EUE into a new segment. Add to this complication the multiple protocols that are now playing in the APM space. For example, the Business Transaction Protocol (BTP) is an XML-based protocol being developed under OASIS as a standardized Internet-based means of managing complex, ongoing B2B transactions among multiple organizations. The protocol is intended to be especially useful in a web services environment, although not all corporate applications utilize web services for their critical business applications.
There are a number of vendors in the APM space, such as Precise Software,OPNET, Compuware, JumpSoft and CA Technologies, as well as larger players like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Oracle looking to grow in the market through strategic acquisitions. A number of startups have won venture capital funding with new, innovative approaches to the problem. In December 2011, Gartner published a report on six newer vendors that are driving innovation in the APM market: Splunk, Netuitive, New Relic, BlueStripe, AppDynamics, ITRS Group, and ExtraHop Networks. In the 2012 Magic Quadrant for APM, Gartner required vendors to offer 3 of the 5 Dimensions of APM, as well as a Software-as-a-Service option to be included in their report. These two new requirements kept some APM vendors from qualifying to be reviewed.
The technology space within APM is very broad and can span across an entire enterprise with numerous options for monitoring. It is not necessarily the number of features or technical stamina of each monitoring tool to process large volumes of data that will make an APM implementation successful - it's the choices you make in how you put them together to manage the event-to-incident flow that determines your success.
Read more about this topic: Application Performance Management
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