The Quocirca report notes that businesses are struggling to map application performance to their business goals, and nearly 80 percent of CIOs are worried that the metrics they do collect on application performance don't map to business metrics. This, Quocirca says, points to a need for an APM system that allows organizations to combine a wide range of statistics in real-time about how well applications are meeting the requirements of lines of business alongside statistics on pure performance.

"What's happened in the last five years is that applications have gone from being the interesting thing that rode on our most important infrastructure to being the center point of IT," says John Van Siclen, general manager of Compuware APM. "It's the connection between the business and IT. The network isn't really a connection between business and IT; servers aren't really either. How an application gets performance from the eyes of your users matters to the business owners who are funding the apps. How we do our banking, book our travel, even manage our kids' education, everything is via Internet transactions. These applications are no longer the step child to the real business. It is the real business."

Where software architects focused on component health in the past, Van Siclen says they must now think of things as transactions: from a click in a browser all the way through the cloud to the data source and back again. Today's APM needs to sit inside an app and light up the whole path a transaction takes.