New Research: Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring 2014

Building large research projects is a major undertaking, not just for the analysts, but the vendors who provide large amounts of data we request, and references we leverage aside from the well over 1,400 APM inquiries we take yearly from end user clients buying and implementing APM. We’ve published the 2014 edition of our yearly magic quadrant for APM. In fact it published a week ago, but I’ve been too busy to blog about it. Understand the technology cut off was in the summer, hence enhancements since then will be counted in the 2015 research.

There are already several press releases and licensed copies available from some of those press releases. We have three leaders in this research, and they have been extending their ability to cater towards APM specific buyers. These three leaders AppDynamics, Compuware (soon to be Dynatrace), and New Relic are moving in different directions, but using their depth in application instrumentation to lead the efforts.

We had one new entrant, SmartBear, who acquired Spanish APM company Lucierna and created a new interesting offering called AlerSite UXM. I have been testing the instrumentation in the lab recently, I will be bloging on it shortly. There have also been major shifts in the last year including CA, HP, IBM, and Microsoft. You can read about these changes, trends, and insight in the research.

There will be a new research note called a Critical Capabilities coming out in the next few weeks which will be a yearly companion to this Magic Quadrant. We are doing more of these across Gartner as they are very complementary in nature. The Magic Quadrant rates and evaluates a vendor’s ability to execute and the vision. The Critical Capabilities document (in our case) will outline several typical buyers or communities of APM users, and show the vendor’s ability to meet specific use cases. The use cases span typical and emerging criteria based on technologies and capabilities, these each have different importance to each buyer. Although I’d like to give away more than I have about this exciting upcoming note, I will hold off for a few weeks :). Think of this document as a technical and deep view of the vendor’s ability to meet these capabilities.

Please leave comments, thanks for reading, and we appreciate the vendors who participated in the research process.