Operations teams value stability.  Uptime is golden.  So it’s no surprise that operations teams buy finished, complete, documented, supported tools from vendors they can hold accountable.  Ops people already have their hands full dealing with complex apps, infrastructure, and users – they don’t need to be hassling with flaky do-it-yourself tools.  Even so, most operations teams still wind up with a mixture of tools from multiple vendors plus home-built integrations and scripts.

Development teams, on the other hand, are developers.  If they need a tool to do exactly what they need, they’ll build one – and share it with their friends.  As agile development has grown into continuous integration and continuous deployment, developers collaboratively created tools to automate tedious tasks and accelerate the application lifecycle.  Customer obsession relies on speed, and speed relies on automation.  The open source collaborative model has been very effective at creating the tools that support high frequency agile releases.   

The DevOps phenomenon brings together these two teams and their divergent cultures.  Yes, stability still matters; but what matters more in the age of the customer is agility through the entire software lifecycle, including the ops portion of release, deployment, and support.  The success of collaborative open source tools in development suggests that operations may be headed the same way.   And in the last year a lot more of my clients are asking about open source APM tools as an alternative to commercial solutions.  I’m also seeing APM vendors more involved in contribution, participation, and use of open source.  As Sam Cooke sang, “a change is gonna come.” 

Read more in my newest brief “DevOps Will Drive Open Source APM.”  I’ll update this blog to include the link as soon as it publishes. 

I’ve attached a quick survey to this blog, please take a minute to tell me where you stand on open source APM.  In the next few months I’ll field a longer survey to quantify the speed and breadth of this change.  If you’d like to be included, please comment here or drop me an email!  Thanks.