This article is based on a survey published by SolarWinds and originally reported by devops.com. Survey data cited below reflects responses from 317 application owners, developers, and support professionals in the U.S. and Canada.
APM Adoption Is Nearly Universal—But Mostly Reactive
Application performance management (APM) tools are now a standard part of the IT toolbox: nine out of ten IT professionals surveyed reported using APM tools deployed either on-premises or via a SaaS platform. Despite that near-universal adoption, the SolarWinds survey reveals a significant gap between how teams could use APM and how they actually do.
Nearly eight in ten respondents said they spend less than 10% of their time proactively optimizing their environments. In practice, this means most APM usage is driven by incidents—teams reach for monitoring data after something breaks rather than using continuous telemetry to prevent issues before they surface.
The Three Biggest APM Challenges
Survey respondents identified a clear hierarchy of obstacles blocking more effective APM use:
- Lack of personnel training (57%) — The top barrier by a wide margin. Teams have the tools but not always the skills to extract full value from them.
- Lack of awareness of available APM solutions (44%) — Many practitioners don’t have a clear picture of what the current APM market offers, making tool selection difficult.
- Confusion over which solution fits their needs (42%) — Even when teams are aware of their options, choosing the right tool for their specific architecture and scale remains a challenge.
Jim Hansen, Vice President of Products for Application Management at SolarWinds, attributed part of the problem to tool sprawl. Organizations are simultaneously running database monitoring (64%), application monitoring (63%), and infrastructure monitoring (61%)—three overlapping disciplines that each demand expertise and context-switching.
Mixed Architectures Are Complicating APM Coverage
The challenge is compounded by the fact that most organizations are not running a single, consistent application architecture. Survey respondents reported managing APM across:
- Monolithic (traditional on-premises) architectures — 59% of respondents
- N-tier service-oriented architectures (SOA) — 40%
- Microservices-based applications — 39%
Running APM across all three simultaneously means teams need tools—and skills—suited to fundamentally different observability models. A single agent-based APM product may work well for a monolithic app but provide incomplete coverage for a distributed microservices environment where requests span dozens of services and multiple infrastructure layers.
Why Microservices Will Force a More Proactive Approach
Hansen pointed out that as organizations migrate away from monolithic applications, the shortcomings of a reactive APM posture will become harder to ignore. Microservices architectures introduce dense dependency graphs: a single user-facing transaction may traverse ten or more services, each with its own latency profile, failure modes, and infrastructure dependencies.
In that context, waiting for an alert before investigating is often too late—by the time a symptom surfaces, root cause may already be buried several hops upstream. This is driving interest in APM platforms that correlate signals across application traces, infrastructure metrics, and logs in a unified view, and that can surface anomalies automatically rather than requiring manual threshold tuning.
Confidence Is High—But Skill Gaps Remain
Despite the challenges, respondents expressed a relatively high degree of self-assessed confidence: 84% said they were confident in their ability to manage application and infrastructure performance. However, the specific use cases where respondents felt most comfortable reveal a continued reactive bias—40% said they are most comfortable using APM tools to troubleshoot application performance issues after they arise.
The top three insights teams said they gain from APM tools were:
- Preventing application outages — 73%
- Preventing app slowdowns related to performance or capacity — 63%
- Improving user and customer experience — 62%
These three outcomes all point toward proactive APM value—yet the earlier finding that most time is spent reactively suggests a gap between aspiration and practice. Teams know what good looks like; they’re not consistently getting there.
Where Teams Want to Improve
When asked about priority areas for development, respondents gave a tightly clustered set of answers:
- Improving ability to track impact across key business metrics — 31%
- Improving ability to troubleshoot application issues — 30%
- Improving application code performance — 29%
- Managing and improving end-user performance — 29%
The clustering of these responses suggests teams recognize they need broad improvement across the APM skill set—not a single weak area—which reinforces the training-gap finding at the top of the challenges list.
What This Means for DevOps Teams
Reactive APM is better than no APM, but it falls short of the continuous feedback loops that underpin mature DevOps and SRE practices. Proactive APM—using baseline telemetry, anomaly detection, and dependency mapping to identify degradation before users notice—requires both the right tooling and teams that are trained to act on the signals those tools surface.
Several practical steps can help bridge the gap identified in this survey:
- Consolidate monitoring disciplines. Where possible, use platforms that unify application, infrastructure, and database observability to reduce context-switching and correlation overhead.
- Define SLOs and alert on symptoms, not just thresholds. Error-budget-based alerting encourages teams to act before outages rather than after them.
- Invest in training alongside tooling. The survey’s top finding—57% citing lack of training—suggests that tool procurement outpaces enablement. Structured onboarding and regular practice with APM dashboards and query languages pays dividends.
- Audit tool sprawl. Running three parallel monitoring categories without integration creates noise and skill fragmentation. Evaluate whether consolidation or tighter integration is feasible.
- Align APM to business outcomes. The 31% of respondents who want better business-metric correlation are pointing toward a real best practice: tying telemetry to revenue, conversion, or reliability SLAs makes APM relevant beyond the ops team.
As hybrid architectures and microservices continue to proliferate, the organizations that invest now in proactive APM practices—and the training to back them up—will be better positioned to maintain reliability at scale without proportional growth in toil.