Demand for APM, Cloud Monitoring and Microservices is on the rise

AppDynamics, the Application Performance Management (APM) vendor has announced new data revealing a surge in demand from technologists for APM, Cloud Monitoring and Microservices support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has required enterprise organizations to shift overnight to an almost completely digital world, leading to unparalleled demand on their IT organizations as they strive to deliver high performing digital experiences to their customers and employees through digital services including websites applications, IoT devices and wearables.

Angie Mistretta, Chief Marketing Officer, AppDynamics, “Applications have quickly become the gateway to the critical digital services we now rely on to function day to day, both for personal and professional needs. This means application owners are getting hit with record usage, while under intense pressure to get products, services and information to their customers quickly – all while maintaining a great digital experience.”

AppDynamics identified three core trends outlining where IT professionals are looking for help right now:

1. Demand for application performance management

As IT professionals struggle to respond to surges in application use and new pressures on the user experience, many have recognized the need for application performance management solutions. AppDynamics are seeing an increase in demand for APM related information through their Premium University program. Their Core APM class through AppDynamics’ Premium University education program has seen a 233 percent increase in attendance.

IT and business leaders are recognizing that they must actively evaluate the performance of their digital experiences in response to increased demands and added pressure from users. Their business success depends on having the tools to accurately monitor and manage their application technology stack, from the user experience to the network.

2. Cloud support

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for businesses to predict demand or rely on capacity models built without accounting for the sudden behavior changes prompted by the pandemic. This means that the IT teams need the flexibility to quickly scale resources up and down, and are increasingly looking to the cloud to help them.

Validating this need for agility, we found that search terms related to cloud services like “cloud operations”, “Azure”, and “AWS monitoring” are trending. Additionally, AppDynamics reported a more than 40 percent increase in traffic to cloud monitoring related pages on its website.

Some organizations that previously used on-premise software deployment are now in a position where they need to enable a remote workforce and provide access to business critical data in real time to team members in numerous working locations. Under the current climate, the path to the cloud is no longer a luxury for businesses – it’s a critical necessity.

3. Developers are turning to microservices to scale new demand

As businesses become completely reliant on the quality of their digital experiences to stay competitive, developers are under intense pressure to write new code faster, update features and fix bugs quickly. To do this at scale, the developer community is turning to microservices to develop, test and deploy code at an extraordinary rate.

The analysis showed a 21 percent increase in traffic to resources on the AppDynamics website related to addressing challenges with microservices adoption and how to use microservices. Likewise, IT teams are turning to container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes to manage and prioritize workloads. Traffic to resources on our website related to Kubernetes monitoring increased by 20 percent and demand for resources about best practices for instrumenting containers increased by 33 percent.

“It’s clear that our newfound reliance on digital is sending IT departments around the world scrambling to manage and scale services without falling short of experience expectations for users.” Angie Mistretta concludes, “IT professionals need additional support and tools in order to combat these new challenges, because they know the quality of the digital experiences they deliver today will impact their success both now, and after the pandemic subsides.”