Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is a branded research methodology which ranks technology providers ability to address a specific technology market as defined by the analysts. This means the company’s ability to execute and vision for the market is the focus of the research. This research is extremely well regarded, but extremely time consuming to craft. Within a specific Magic Quadrant, a provider would have a single dot placement, but may have several solutions in any given market.
In 2009, analyst Mark Nicolett created the Critical Capabilities. Over time this document became branded, but not mandatory for each Magic Quadrant. That policy changed in 2014 when Gartner began to mandate Critical Capabilities be paired with each Magic Quadrant. This research is designed to be a deeper look at product and fit of the product for specific use cases.
Within APM, the first Critical Capabilities was published in 2014, and it’s evolved in the latest iteration as the team has evolved its thinking. Within APM buyers, Gartner has determined these as the main use cases:
- Application Support
- Application Development
- IT Operations
- Application Owner or LOB
- DevOps Release
The ‘Critical Capabilities’ research report, provides a comprehensive and technical product analysis ranking APM suites on critical APM capabilities across five different usage scenarios. Fifteen vendor products were chosen and evaluated for each capability, and scored on a five-point scale. The capabilities assessed for each use case included business analysis, service monitoring, anomaly detection, distributed profiling, application debugging, and workload planning.
AppDynamics received the highest score all five use cases:
- Application Support (4.24 of 5): Involved with the end-to-end behaviors of applications. Focused on problem detection, isolation, and remediation. End-user experience monitoring and mobile APM are important capabilities.
- Application Development (4.11 of 5): Code-level visibility and “the ability to compare and profile code in production environments” are important criteria for this use case, as is the ability to address native mobile applications.
- IT Operations (3.36 of 5): Focused primarily on infrastructure efficiency, while also monitoring the application technology that runs the business and impacts profitability.
- Application Owner or LOB (4.21 of 5): Focused less on technical performance details and more on business metrics and end-user experience data.
- DevOps Release (3.57 of 5): Requires the ability to quickly assess new releases and detect and diagnose any issues, leveraging multiple, integrated tools; also encompasses future requirements planning.
AppDynamics CEO, David Wadhwani, said “We’re very pleased with AppDynamics’ showing in the recent Gartner ‘Critical Capabilities’ report. As enterprises increasingly embrace digital transformation, it’s critical that they have an effective and unified application performance management solution and analytics solution in place — application intelligence is an essential pillar for success in this software-driven world. Gartner’s research further solidifies AppDynamics’ leadership across the board, by being named a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for APM and in the use cases that are paramount for every enterprise.”
With every industry undergoing transformation for the new digital age, APM technology becomes increasingly more critical to business. The report provides recommendations for IT planners on competitive products/services to be considered for further evaluation, dependent on the capabilities needed and the usage scenarios essential to their business.
