GigaOm Radar for Application Performance Management (APM)v3.0

1. Executive Summary

Applications today provide a technological means to deliver a host of business, entertainment, and social services, and to provide access to an ever-increasing range of products and information. These applications serve academia, government, businesses, mission-driven organizations, and individuals. Many are developed for broad off-the-shelf use, while others are customized solutions for organizational needs. They may execute in on-premises infrastructure or public or private cloud environments, as a SaaS application, in low-code/no-code environments, and in various combinations.

In all cases, applications are becoming increasingly complex, and the growing reliance on them places mounting pressure on IT operations monitoring teams to ensure these applications are running properly. The business imperative is to keep applications performing at peak levels to support a range of causes and purposes.

Moreover, with the additional emphasis on DevOps and SecOps, developers are now part of the operations landscape and must have the tools they need to help ensure the future performance and reliability of applications. Developers must handle application code complexity and the use of virtualized and as-code infrastructure. Application performance management (APM) solutions are able to respond to this need, offering insights to IT operations and to development and security teams. These tools must handle a much more complex environment that now includes both operations personnel and developers. The benefit of such tools is preemption of degraded application performance and security vulnerabilities and guaranteed availability.

Current APM solutions often interact with the code via code injection or an application agent. These full-stack solutions provide detailed insights in the actual code responsible for generating metrics and other observations. Use cases include the full stack that involves all supporting components of the application delivery model and faults at any layer in the stack illustrating errors, anomalies, or degradation.

Many APM solutions have been folded into observability tools, moving the needle from monitoring to observability and, eventually, to awareness. Operational and organizational awareness requires monitoring and observing IT systems and applications. The relationships among monitoring, observability, and awareness (MOA) are shown in Figure 1. MOA refers to the process by which data about operations (IT) and business (people and processes) is tracked and evaluated to enable a company to develop organizational awareness.

Figure 1. Monitoring, Observability, and Awareness Relationship

Monitoring provides the state of a single system (or service) and metrics about it (performance or a break/fix condition).

Observability looks at the state of multiple systems and asks additional questions about the health of these systems as a whole, such as why devices, systems, or applications are behaving a certain way within the context of IT.

Awareness brings together all information about the company to evaluate whether operations (IT) and business (people and processes) are performing in an acceptable way, what is likely to break next, and how to prevent problems before they are monitored or observed.

APM solutions are now situated squarely within the observability space, with some vendors moving toward awareness resulting from the addition of more analytical tooling using AI.

This is our third year evaluating the APM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines twelve of the top APM solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading APM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.