Application monitoring tools are often underused
Enterprises may have eleven or more commercial tools in place for application performance management (APM), yet they're not using them effectively according to a new survey.
Application intelligence company AppDynamics has released the results of a survey, conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), of IT professionals from companies of all sizes across both North America and Europe, looking at the APM solutions they have in place, monitoring gaps, and the time and resources required to resolve application-based issues.
Findings include that 65 percent of the companies surveyed own more than 10 different commercial monitoring products. But nearly half also indicated that 50 percent or fewer of their purchased tools are actively being used.
Calls from users are the second most frequent way that IT organizations find out about application-related problems (27 percent cited detection by monitoring centers; 25 percent cited user calls). For problems escalated beyond level one support, mean time to repair (MTTR) is most often between five and seven hours. It can also take between three and four people to solve a given problem.
"Based on our findings, the majority of companies are still trying to manage complex applications with a combination of siloed tools, 'all hands on deck' interactive marathons, and tribal knowledge," says Julie Craig, research director, application management at EMA. "The ability to automatically discover and manage the business transaction topology as the application itself changes is a significant challenge encountered by virtually every IT organization".
When asked what they wanted from APM tools, 75 percent identified flexible deployment options as a critical factor, while 70 percent want the ability to monitor infrastructure as a service (IaaS) public cloud systems.
In terms of feature preference the top three 'must-haves' are: an integrated monitoring platform, cloud readiness, and support for trending and reporting.
More details about the survey and its findings are available on the AppDynamics blog.
Photo Credit: Sergii Korolko/Shutterstock