As the IT world moves full swing, headfirst into the 21st century, new systems are being deployed at unheard of rates, higher volumes of users are on a platform at one time, bigger databases are being used on and off-premise, and multi-cloud platforms are running operational day-to-day. There is now a need for a wide range of infrastructures to be used in a single organization. And, the importance of keeping an eye on all of it is more valuable than ever.
From a recent BMC Blogs post, “The purpose of IT monitoring is to determine how well your IT infrastructure and the underlying components perform in real-time. IT monitoring lets users identify IT issues in real-time in order to make well-informed decisions for resource provisioning, IT security, or to evaluate usage trends.” Ultimately, serving as the backbone to keeping an organization going, the types of monitoring are a follows:
- System monitoring
- Dependency monitoring
- Integration and API monitoring
- Business activity monitoring
- Application performance monitoring
- Real user monitoring
- Security monitory
- ITSM monitoring
In efforts to better equip any organization with a strong monitoring practice, in this article, let’s take a look at some recent reports from Redgate, Report Linker, Intricately, and Gartner on the IT Monitoring industry in 2020. After uncovering their key findings and trends, a clearer picture of this growing industry should start to appear.
Redgate State of Database Monitoring Report
In the late spring of 2020, Redgate released it’s 3rd annual “State of Database Monitoring Report.” Focused on the biggest challenges that monitoring teams face in the coming year as well as how DevOps teams are aligning with monitoring processes, this year they also address how monitoring is impacted from COVID-19 and increasing remote work.
After surveying nearly 1,000 professionals, this report comes full of insights into the monitoring industry’s future and 6 stand-out key findings.
- Business longevity depends on reliable, effective monitoring. Manual monitoring has drastically declined while monitoring tool use has increased. This is linked directly to the pandemic and “business-as-usual” operations while remote.
- The number one challenge IT monitoring professionals are facing right now is the migration to the cloud. This movement will allow operational flexibility.
- Organizations are growing. Having less than 100 instances a year is becoming fewer and fewer while having over 1,000 instances is increasing.
- For DevOps success, monitoring is needed. For better detection and recovery times, monitoring tools assist teams in the background.
- Monitoring tools are growing in popularity with higher satisfaction rates. This growth reflected the great need or reliance on these tools.
- The most popular database platform is still a SQL Server.
Report Linker’s Network Monitoring Report
A recent report from Report Linker, “Network Monitoring Market: Global Industry Analysis, Trends, Market Size, and Forecasts up to 2026,” unveiled what type of growth the industry should expect in the coming years. Using primary and secondary resources, it covered a segmented market based on component, enterprise size network speed, and application.
Starting off with a bang, Report Linker seeing big things happening in the Monitoring industry, suggests that “a CAGR of 9.4% over the forecast period from 2020-2026.” This statement stems from the report’s 3 key findings.
- Drivers
- “Rapid industrialization and growing adoption of IoT based technology and BYOD devices by organizations.”
- “Rise in complex networking, security concerns, and increasing demand for continuous monitoring.”
- Restraints
- “High cost involved in the installation.”
- Opportunities
- “Increasing demand for network monitoring from small and medium scale industries.”
Intricately’s Application Performance Monitoring Report
In early January, the data company Intricately released its thoughts on “Application Performance Monitoring in 2020.” Using the organization’s own collected data, they began by stating, “According to Intricately, there are at least 400K businesses around the globe that should be deploying APM solutions. When we say businesses, we’re referencing companies that buy enterprise cloud infrastructure. The reality is that everyone using cloud-based apps needs an APM solution.” And, truth is, most companies this day in age are migrating to cloud-based applications. Therefore, extreme growth for APM is on the close horizon.
Driving home the point of how important APM becomes to every and all organizations, the CEO of Intricately, Fima Leshinkey states his to key findings for 2020 as performance and visibility.
- Performance
“This is the smaller section of the APM market, and not really where the money lies. It’s focused on measuring the performance of applications: primarily in regards to web applications and load times.”
- Visibility
“The more significant part of the APM market is all about gaining visibility into application behavior. It has little to do with end-user performance, and everything to do with infrastructure monitoring and management for the complex and sophisticated backend of applications.”
Closing out their thoughts on APM in the coming year, Intricately stresses how the importance comes down to application behavior. Every company is unique, “APM’s job is to provide visibility into the behavior of your application, making it a critical tool for small startups to giant enterprises and everyone in between.”
Gartner on Application Performance Monitoring
An older report that is still having an impact today is Gartner’s “Broaden Application Performance Monitoring to Support Digital Business Transformation” released in late December 2018.
Used to expand the focus of APM practices while stressing how important they will become in the coming years, analysts at Garner begin the report by stating, “To support digital business transformation, I&O leaders must broaden APM tool coverage to focus on business insight, customer experience, and service health.” Today, this statement couldn’t be more applicable. With projections that 20% of all business applications will be monitored via APM by 2021, the report also claimed that the industry would see a four-fold usage increase.
Throughout the report, techniques are given to achieve 3 key takeaways to stay on trend with application monitoring as it grows in the future.
- Identify what problems and issues are affecting the customer experience.
- Performance metrics connecting with real business results.
- The use of real-time insights to adjust business processes and customer journeys.
As organizations move to better serve their customers, IT teams are becoming more focused on those above-mentioned infrastructures in order to measure results, and Gartner was right on the money with the prediction that APM would be a growing asset.
