2024 Unveiled: Catchpoint's Predictions for APM, ITOM, OTel & Beyond

As the holiday season rolls in, it’s not just about festive cheer and resolutions; it’s also time for industry leaders to cast their predictions for the new year. This year, Catchpoint’s thought leaders have stepped up with their hottest takes for 2024.

Catchpoint experts are envisioning a transformative shift in the monitoring technologies, a heightened focus on performance as a key metric, and an integrated strategy for managing digital performance management.  

A sneak peek into what we think 2024 has in store:

Performance Becomes More Important Than Uptime and Availability

“Performance metrics will finally overtake uptime and availability as the most monitored indicators. Slow is the new down. No longer will uptime be discussed without performance as Internet Performance Management becomes a recognized priority for businesses looking to achieve resilience and optimize digital customer experience. In 2024, performance conversations will be paramount.”  

Holding Vendors Accountable for SLAs

“Web teams will realize their increased dependency on third-party systems, applications, services, and the overall internet, which require monitoring and optimization for all the dependencies from cloud providers to CDNs to web components. We'll see a shift in how they consolidate and evaluate their vendors to hold them accountable to SLAs.” A prediction made a few weeks before the Adobe Outage made this very real for thousands of sites.  

Customers Demand OpenTelemetry

“Fear will battle control in the war for OpenTelemetry. But who will win? On one hand, vendors and providers will be leery to grant access to their low-level data which may increase the risk of service-level breaches or poorly performing ad providers. On the other hand, customers and practitioners will continue desiring ownership and visibility. They'll also want to reduce the risk of the proliferation of multiple APM tools and high costs while enhancing their ability to handle the increasing volume of data. We believe the adage "the customer is always right" will prevail here.” The days of locking customers into software are coming to an end, as modern tools are designed to ingest and export data to be combined with other data sources.  

User Experience Over Application Metrics

“Observability teams will realize the importance of understanding user experience versus application metrics. The fact that a database call has a slightly longer wait time will become less critical than if the application is not meeting the user's expectations of performance. This will directly link resilience and performance back to business impact as a poor user experience can lead to lost revenue.”. Large brands have for about two decades invested in customer experience systems including metrics such as NPS. Now these brands realize digital customer experience allows them to proactively improve customer experience, as most customer interactions are either digital, or heavily impacted by digital systems.  

OpenTelemetry Focuses on End-user Experience

“Quality goes beyond which is internally controlled to include third-party — especially critical — dependencies thanks to OpenTelemetry. As the focus shifts from application exclusive to user experience inclusive, access to real-time data will be even more critical as DevOps teams ingest user experience metrics, business KPI, and SLAs.” This requires IT Ops teams to think about OTel beyond the APM tools (logs, metrics, and traces) that it originally aimed to consolidate to include user-experience data such as RUM and Synthetic monitoring.  

ITSM Teams Invest in Employee Experience Management

“ITSM teams will invest in employee experience management tools to minimize digital friction and to proactively address issues with connectivity and application performance from the user perspective for both distributed remote and in-office employees. We'll see an uptick in understanding and mapping user journeys so organizations can best tailor digital experiences to individual preferences.” Maybe Chief People Officers will start demanding IT to improve productivity and employee experience in today’s hybrid but still distributed world.  

Incorporating User Experience Metrics into Dev

“User experience metrics will be further incorporated into the development and testing lifecycle.” More DevOps teams will set requirements beyond functionality and release dates to also include performance, customer satisfaction, and other metrics that are measured during development, in production, and with every code release.  

Proactive Employee Experience Monitoring

“Gartner Research reported a year ago that 47% of internal users experience significant digital friction on a daily basis with the IT systems they need to do their job: email, Zoom meetings, Slack, etc. Thus, proactive employee experience monitoring (DEX) will become a main priority as companies realize the importance of ensuring connectivity and access to applications employees need to do their jobs effectively in 2024.”  

The Internet is the De Facto Corporate Network in 2024

“The Internet is your network. Companies will be forced to look at new sets of tools as LANs become less important than understanding the broader distributed networks across the web.” The modern network engineer is proficient at optimizing a broader set of internet-based technologies including SASE, WANs, multi-cloud systems, and complex, globally distributed applications.

No Code / Low Code Prediction

“Businesses will start to hire ‘high-school interns’ to develop their apps – by that I mean they will explore GenAI capabilities but will need to treat them as non-experienced ‘high school’ workforce staff whose work needs to be double and triple-checked. In four years, we can see how GenAI performs when it graduates to college.”  

Resilience is a Board-Level Priority

We have seen many organizations appoint a CISO to be accountable for security. Similarly, as organizations prioritize resilience above growth across functions (financial resilience, systems resilience, operational resilience, etc.) more organizations will appoint a Chief Resilience Officer or will create a similar position to centralize planning, governance and accountability for resilience. This is accelerated by regulation such as DORA, the new EU regulation that mandates resilience for financial systems.  

These predictions are the opinions of Leo Vasiliou, Director of Product Marketing who is also the main author of the annual SRE Report and Gerardo A. Dada, CMO, who acts as field CTO at Catchpoint.

A version of these predictions was originally shared with APMDigest, which were featured as part of its 8-part series on Application Performance Management (APM) predictions in Part 1, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8 of the series

As you can see, 2024 will be a year of transformation in which a strategic integration of the elements laid out above will help optimize business resilience and enhance the digital customer experience.