Table of Contents
- Summary
- APM Primer
- Report Methodology
- Decision Criteria Analysis
- Evaluation Metrics
- Key Criteria: Impact Analysis
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Ron Williams
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Today, applications exist in on-premises infrastructure, public clouds, private clouds, SaaS deployments, and hybrids of these. They’re also increasingly separated into parts (services or microservices), with individual modules managed by different developers or support teams for each portion of the application.
The complexity of modern business computing environments places pressure on IT operations teams to ensure the applications and services that support the enterprise are running properly and places an additional load on developers who must handle the application code complexity and infrastructure use. With a growing emphasis on DevOps practices, developers and citizen programmers are now a part of the operations landscape and must have the tools and knowledge to participate.
The goal of application performance management (APM) is to ensure applications deliver optimal speed, reliability, scalability, and end-user experience to support key business services and objectives. APM solutions help organizations to ensure that applications and services remain performant and available, providing a tangible benefit to any business IT environment, regardless of size.
APM solutions provide end-to-end visibility into all components of the application delivery environment, from backend databases and servers to networking infrastructure, application code, and user locations and devices. This holistic view helps IT teams quickly identify, isolate, and resolve performance issues before they impact productivity or customers. Additionally, via low-code/no-code capabilities, APM solutions provide a collaborative environment for operations personnel, developers, and citizen programmers.
This is the second year that GigaOm has reported on 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 few years.
This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key criteria, and emerging technologies) and non-functional requirements (evaluation metrics) for selecting an effective APM solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those capabilities and metrics. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading APM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.
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.