One of the key questions in IT performance management is: Does an improved ability to collect more performance data generally lead to an improved performance of IT services? The answer is: No, not necessarily. Actually, a number of end-user organizations that I have spoken with reported that their ability to prevent and resolve performance issues deteriorated after they invested in additional monitoring tools. As new challenges of managing application performance “jump out”, organizations tend to deploy new point solutions that are addressing each of these problems. This does allow them to collect more information about these specific problems, but it doesn’t necessarily allow them to have  better control of the overall IT performance.

Managing application performance is one of the key IT initiatives for end-users, but there is not a single class of technology or solution provider that can address every single issue of managing the performance of business-critical applications. Some major IT management vendors are investing significant resources in acquiring companies to enhance their product offering and enable them to tackle more performance challenges. However, the capabilities needed for end-to-end management of IT performance are rapidly changing and companies that are looking to provide capabilities for addressing each of the major IT management challenges are likely to keep playing “catch-up”. End-user requirements are changing at a pace that is faster than product development cycles or times needed for acquisitions to be initiated, agreed on and completed. So, are organizations that are looking to access all relevant IT performance data through a single platform are out of luck?

The good news for end-user organizations is that there are some innovative vendors out there that have figured out how to use the strengths of other IT management vendors to their advantage. The vendors are opening their APIs to make it easier for end-user organizations to import data that is being collected by other tools and correlate this information with their own performance data. This type of approach allows them to enable their customers to access all relevant performance information, even though these vendors are not able to collect all of this information on their own.

Examples of vendors that are taking this type of approach include companies like Zyrion, Correlsense and dynaTrace. Zyrion is a BSM vendor who helps organizations understand how different parts of their infrastructure are impacting their business services. But guess what? There are many other BSM vendors that are providing capabilities that are, at least on a high level, similar to what Zyrion is doing. However, Zyrion decided to open their APIs and allow end-users to integrate data collected by any other IT management solution that they might be using into their platform. By doing that, they positioned themselves to be more than just a traditional BSM vendor. Their users can now leverage their dashboards to access any performance information that they are able to collect by using a variety of different tools. A similar example is Correlsense. TRAC’s upcoming research report will examine recent moves that Business Transaction Management (BTM) vendors made to add capabilities for End-User Monitoring (EUM) to their portfolios. Correlsense is a company that had both of these capabilities integrated since the day it was launched. More importantly, they opened their APIs to allow organizations to import information collected by other infrastructure monitoring tools into their dashboards and provide their customers data that goes beyond their monitoring capabilities. Additionally, dynaTrace opened APIs for their application performance management solutions and allowed end-users to import performance reports in the various formats.

Another example of a company that is taking a somewhat similar approach is Anue Systems. With many different network monitoring vendors trying to improve both the performance and security of networks, Anue developed a technology that filters information that is being processed by these tools while being able to aggregate all of this data and allowing other monitoring tools access to it.

In a market where the needs for IT managing solutions are constantly changing, some vendors are realizing that even though their prospects could benefit from their solutions, they are often not willing to replace their existing tools, but are looking for new capabilities that would complement these products. These companies are perfectly happy with increasing their market share without trying to “squeeze out” other IT management vendors that might be perceived as their competitors. Instead, they are building capabilities that would allow them to co-exist with other products.

There is a number of technology vendors that are doing a good job of collecting information about the different parts of enterprise infrastructure and presenting it back to IT managers. However, making this information more actionable is the key. For that to happen, some vendors need to realize that they can’t be everything to everyone. More importantly, they need to realize that their mission in the market should be to help their customers solve problems, not to beat their competitors. Companies that are truly committed to solving key IT management challenges are enabling their customers to get the most out of, not only their solutions, but from solutions provided by other IT management vendors as well.