Enterprises are increasingly looking to their software portfolio to serve as a differentiator when trying to outpace their competition. The software-defined digital transformation requires customer-facing software to be more complex and agile as ever, to keep up with the evolving end user, who grows in expectations and opportunities of the applications they require. Although these intricate software solutions generate enormous amounts of raw diagnostic data, extracting meaningful business-oriented insights from these reams of uncorrelated signals has routinely been very difficult to achieve – until now.

Today, leading software suppliers are providing a fresh take on Information Technology Operations Analytics. Earlier generations of ITOA specialized in these complex software solutions by attempting to supply technical users with essential operation evidence but proved to be costly and operationally inefficient. Today’s ITOA technology blends automatically captured and correlated application metrics - including deep business awareness - with the powerful data visualization capabilities offered by analytics. This has revolutionized the job of monitoring, troubleshooting, and correcting business transactions, notably including those that span multiple systems.

This paper explores the software development trends that led to the evolution of ITOA systems, and how the most effective implementations of this vital technology work. It also explains why choosing the right product is crucial, and offer three fundamental characteristics of a modern ITOA offering that can help identify the right solution.