Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is an absolute need for every online application. People use different APMs, but they want new features as part of the new year gift! Based on our meets and surveys with various people, from devops to senior management, we have given these features as top 5 items. Some existing APMs may give a part of these already; but the wish list is that these must be part of every APM.
Machine Learning/AI based inferences
While managing 100s of servers and applications, human brains are not able to correlate and isolate disjoiint events and thus fail to see the very high level pattern of failures. With machine learning techniques, the APM data must be analyzed to see the connection between disjoint events. The APM must automatically choose the relevant ML/AI algorithms.
Self Healing
Based on symptoms, with prior outage history, system must automatically heal itself. APMs detect these abnormal metrics. From APM tools, the devops must be able to execute routines to auto heal. The solution to heal, will be different for different servers/apps/dbs/solutions; and these routines must be validated before they are applied automatically.
Version based comparisons
Most APMs today provide metrics comparisons based on 2 time windows. If an application version 1.3 is running from 2-Oct to 15-Oct and version 1.4 is running from 16-Oct to 24-Oct, user must simply ask the APM to compare performance of version 1.3 and 1.4. This can be build number based as well. The APM must provide such comparison reports.
What changed in my environment
Half the time is spent to find out what changed from yesterday to today, when crash or slowness is seen in applications. APMs must automatically tell us what changed in binaries or folders or config files or ports or access permissions or OS patches etc. If we know the exact delta between today and any other day, our ability to isolate the issues goes 10 fold faster.
Simple pricing
This is not a product feature, but most of the times, the buyer is confused by various parameters like number of agents, page views per month etc. Customers want a simple pricing so that they can provision the budget with ease. Many current APMs have a lot of hidden agenda behind the pricing and this needs a serious look.
