Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Ron Williams
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Application performance monitoring (APM) is an IT tool that seeks to understand how applications react when in use, and diagnose problems to improve performance and serve business needs. Historically, developers would write bits of code into their applications that would signal what was executing and use other data to determine application performance. Those days have long passed. Within the complicated world of modern distributed applications, microservices, cloud computing, and hybrid environments, heightened business and customer expectations are the norm.
The increase in operating functions and capability places an additional load on developers. They must handle not just the application code complexity but also the use of underlying infrastructure. Applications may run in on-premises infrastructure, public cloud environments, private clouds, SaaS applications, and hybrids of these models.
With the additional emphasis on DevOps, developers are now a part of the operations landscape and must have the tools to participate. APM tools now must handle a much more complex environment with both operations personnel and developers, and within low code/no-code environments, encompassing citizen programmers.
Standards within the APM world are minimal; however, OpenTelemetry, an open-source project, holds the promise of a common method of transferring data. OpenTelemetry is currently a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project with the goal of providing a set of vendor-agnostic libraries and APIs, such as traces, metrics, and logs, for collecting and sending data.
This report explores vendors in the application performance monitoring marketplace.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.