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Perception Is Reality: Why IT Must Own Application Performance

Are you doing enough to ensure mission-critical applications are running at maximum performance? If not, your competitors may be gaining customers at your expense, and there are plenty of service providers who believe they can do better.

Proactive is the name of the game in today's ultra-competitive environment. And if you're banking on moving to the cloud or heavy virtualization, make sure you don’t go too far down these roads without having an application performance monitoring (APM) plan in place. Otherwise, even the most basic problem may cause hours of downtime and a level of user frustration that no one wants to deal with.

Yet, deal with frustration we are—it's disturbing that 25% of the 320 business technology professionals who responded to our InformationWeek Analytics APM survey say they experience application performance problems on a daily or weekly basis. An additional 28% say issues crop up monthly. More than half of respondents rate app services as critically important, and 95% say customers and employees have little to no tolerance for outages. In our practice we've seen a few seconds' delay in a customer-facing Web app spell the difference between a sale and loss of revenue to a competitor. Most IT groups monitor key network and system components, but a lack of visibility into the end-to-end health of applications often results in IT managers spending too much time trying to isolate problems. Meanwhile, users are frustrated, the organization’s mission is suffering and revenue is being lost.

So why are just 31% using APM today? Certainly, cost is a factor. But let's face it, our applications and the delivery infrastructures they depend on aren't getting any easier to understand, so complexity is also contributing  to slow uptake. In this InformationWeek Analytics report, we analyze IT's ability to measure and monitor performance of mission-critical apps and provide metrics to users and customers. We'll also discuss innovative models for APM—vendors now offer compelling products that will answer many of the questions that arise when a performance issue wreaks havoc. If enterprise IT groups don’t start to truly own their applications, they'll continue to waste time placating users and enduring hour-long conference calls in often vain attempts to troubleshoot problems. Surely we have better ways to spend our time than finger-pointing exercises? (720509)

Survey Name: InformationWeek Analytics Application Performance
Management Survey
Survey Date: April 2009
Region: North America
Number of Respondents: 320