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Contributed by Mirko Novakovic, CEO and co-founder of Instana

The Complexity of IT will Drive the Democratization of APM

As organizations strive for greater efficiency in IT, they are using a variety of tools. Architectures like microservices are the backbone of new, dynamic application services, and containers are being used to speed deployment of new functionality. This complexity of IT will force the democratization of application performance management to bridge the divide between Ops, Dev and SRE teams and improve communication to better ensure quality of service.

Next generation APM tools must address the scale of these new application architectures in terms of the number of services involved and their dependencies, as well as the dynamics of these systems with regard to deploying new versions of the services, dynamically scheduling containers and using the elasticity of cloud infrastructure and platforms. This includes the use of functions as a service which introduces a whole new level of dynamism.

To help the full set of IT users, APM must be revolutionized to not only capture the data, but also provide intelligence and information from that data. It must deliver visibility and understanding of what is happening within the logical and physical dependencies of an application and it must be done automatically - within seconds.

That is the only way IT Ops can survive the complexity that's been created. Automation and intelligence will lead the way. With automation providing the discovery and model of everything that constructs the application, and artificial intelligence predicting incidents and resolution, a ‘truth engine' evolves. Modern, democratized APM will provide the deep knowledge and understanding into everything that makes up a dynamic application and ultimately helps the entire Ops team maintain service quality.  

About the Author

CEO and co-founder of Instana, Mirko Novakovic brings deep technological experience with a background that includes performance management software, agile development and DevOps. Novakovic started Instana four years ago, recognizing that today's dynamic applications need a new approach for managing containerized microservice applications - one that leverages automated AI-powered performance management to manage applications based on cloud, microservices and containers. 

Prior to Instana, Novakovic founded codecentric AG, a leading software consulting firm focused on performance, agile software development and software architecture.

He received a Bachelor of Applied Science in Information Technology at Stuttgart University and an SMB Management at the University of St. Gallen.