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Hybrid IT is the past, present and future of tech environments, and while hybrid IT continues to evolve and change, the hybrid reality itself shows no sign of stopping or slowing down. In fact, it’s only going to become more complex as new technologies emerge and legacy tech remains.
In a recent survey conducted by the SolarWinds THWACK community, THWACK members revealed how hybrid IT infrastructure is impacting business applications in the organizations they support—whether that’s where they’re hosted, how they’re managed or how they’ll be managed in the future.
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Following the survey, SolarWinds asked its THWACK community members to share how an application performance monitoring (APM) strategy fits into their job and organization overall. In this eWEEK Data Points article, SolarWinds explores how APM is important to their roles and the businesses they support.
Data Point No. 1: Don’t forget about the infrastructure.
“Business application monitoring became the utmost priority to companies once the shift towards hybrid infrastructure began. APM tools provide an overall view of what’s happening with your application AND infrastructure that it’s hosted on, making it easy to track the root cause of application errors, all under one single pane of glass.” —THWACK user: Vinay BY
“Now, the focus is on the business application rather than the infrastructure, when in reality, it’s the other way around. Businesses aligned with cloud as their base are not bothered about infrastructure and totally rely on application monitoring. Meanwhile, cloud providers already have built in bare monitoring for the infrastructure.” —THWACK user: Vinay BY
Although cloud providers have already built in this bare-bones monitoring for the infrastructure, that monitoring is not integrated with application monitoring—you must marry both app and infrastructure monitoring to succeed. Application monitoring should be integrated into every diagnostic, troubleshooting step. If you can see what is happening, you can resolve the issue quickly!” —THWACK user: ferrashoo
Data Point No. 2: Not everything belongs in the cloud—and what does belong takes time to migrate.
“Flexibility is key. Although we are definitely using cloud solutions, the notion that cloud is an ‘all or nothing’ answer-or that everything will be in the cloud- is incorrect. There are a few startups or web-based companies that can pull that off, but it makes no sense from an ROI perspective for most enterprises going all-in with the cloud. It’s a case-by-case basis. In the case of hybrid applications, you need to be able to look at it end-to-end wherever it’s hosted.” —THWACK user: df112, Director, Database & Systems Engineering
“It’s a slow process migrating applications to the cloud. Transitioning monitoring strategies in a seamless manner substantially helps with this migration.” —THWACK user: thulsey, NOC Monitoring Administrator
Data Point No. 3: APM is key to helping organizations remediate issues quickly, ultimately keeping business moving as usual and providing users with a top user experience.
“APM metrics have helped me to curb the time investigating potential issues, and given engineers reliable data so they can manage and isolate issues quickly.” —THWACK user: I LIKE EGGS
“APM plays a very important role.Today we have hybrid infrastructure solutions and things don’t quite work the way they did in the past, where we used to monitor the infrastructure and then drill down to the application that’s hosted on it.” —THWACK user: Vinay BY
This data point corresponds with SolarWinds’ IT Pro Day 2019 survey: Building Confidence for Tech Pros of Tomorrow key findings, which revealed that APM is key to achieving top end-user experiences, and it’s become increasingly important for tech pros to further develop skills in APM.
Data Point No. 4: Despite its importance, APM is not yet universally prioritized.
“I’d love to use APM tools as a part of our infrastructure monitoring but haven’t the budget to make it happen. I think APM is important to a successful IT department and the businesses and customers it supports.” —THWACK user: rschroeder, Network Analyst
If you have a suggestion for an eWEEK Data Points article, email cpreimesberger@eweek.com.