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Enterprises have multiple commercial tools in place for application performance management (APM), but a new survey found a third of business end users — not APM software —are providing the initial alerts that inform IT teams about application performance problems.
This was one of the findings of a survey of 105 application engineers, application support personnel and IT managers from IT management company ManageEngine. The survey also revealed 28 percent of respondents find most of their performance issues by running ad hoc scripts.
The findings indicated many IT teams still do not have a monitoring solution in place or do not have a monitoring solution that is equipped to detect certain types of performance issues, and also that businesses still do not use monitoring solutions to monitor their entire application set.
“The most concerning finding is that 32 percent of businesses still rely on their end users to notify them of application performance issues,” Sridhar Iyengar, vice president of product management for ManageEngine, told eWEEK. “This means that those businesses depend on users — instead of APM software — to tell them about application problems. That means those users and, ultimately, the business suffer as a result.”
He said ideally, a business will have APM solutions in place that allow it to be proactive and take preventive and corrective measures before users feel application outages or performance degradation.
“This proactive behavior is the hallmark of today’s responsive and customer-focused organization and is a true differentiator to win customers in a competitive landscape,” he said.
Many enterprises (81 percent) take up to four hours to resolve incidents of application outages, and 60 percent of respondents reported they take up to four hours to repair application performance issues such as slow page loading.
The findings also indicate private clouds are still the preferred choice for hosting business-critical applications, with half of respondents saying they have the bulk of their business apps on the private cloud.
Twenty percent of respondents said they have more than half of their applications deployed on the public cloud, and 20 percent of respondents said they have close to half of their deployments on a hybrid cloud and are considering increasing their hybrid cloud footprint.
In addition, 70 percent of businesses indicated that most of their end users access enterprise applications through a Web interface, although access through mobile devices is on the rise.
“APM solutions not only have to keep pace but also have to be one step ahead by abstracting those complexities and presenting the application teams with easy-to-understand insights that can help the teams be proactive and accelerate problem remediation,” Iyengar said.