Nearly one out of every three businesses (32%) become aware of most application performance issues from their end users, according to a recent ManageEngine Application Performance Monitoring Survey.
Given the relative maturity of the application performance management (APM) market, those numbers suggest quite a few IT teams still face basic APM challenges, including:
■ No monitoring solution in place – 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.
■ Monitoring solution is improperly configured – IT admins have not efficiently configured their monitoring. Others don’t follow APM best practices, e.g., setting threshold values that allow some performance variation and only trigger notifications when performance is unacceptable.
■ Not all applications are monitored – Businesses still do not use monitoring solutions to monitor their entire application set. Often, only those applications deemed critical by the IT team get monitored.
■ Not all APM problems are anticipated – IT teams test their applications during the QA stage and set up monitoring, but an unforeseen problem arises later when the application is in production, being used by real users.
The survey reveals that while more than half of those surveyed felt that the current set of APM tools provide end-user satisfaction, IT administrators still feel that there could be improvement, namely providing faster and easier answers to their troubleshooting and performance questions.
Other highlights from the IT professionals surveyed in North America and Europe include:
■ 59% trust monitoring tools to identify most performance deviations.
■ 28% use ad hoc scripts to detect issues in over 50 percent of their applications.
■ Resolution of application downtime and performance issues is time consuming – Many enterprises (81%) take up to 4 hours to resolve incidents of application outages. 60% of respondents reported they take up to 4 hours to repair application performance issues such as slow page loading.
■ Private cloud is still the preferred choice for hosting business-critical applications – 50% of respondents said they have the bulk of their business apps on the private cloud.
■ Public and hybrid cloud adoption is on the rise – The public cloud provides convenience and unmatched scalability. 20% of respondents said they have over 50% of their applications deployed on the public cloud. 20% of respondents said they have close to half of their deployments on a hybrid cloud and are considering increasing their hybrid cloud footprint.
■ Mobile access is on the rise – 70%f businesses indicated that most of their end users access enterprise applications through a Web interface, although access through mobile devices is on the rise.
Enterprise mobile apps have yet to reach the high performance and usability of consumer mobile apps. Most enterprises are at a nascent stage in their adoption of mobility, still figuring out how to start their app development in terms of tools, vendors, architectures or platforms. The increasing variety of devices available for users today – from smartphones and tablets to wearables – makes it a challenge for enterprise IT to develop and maintain mobile apps to suit their users’ needs.
